This was back in September time when there were some delays but nothing like now. They were just rubbish, disorganised, too busy arguing with each other in front of potential customers and the particular lady who dealt with me was stuck so far up herself she could barely deign to speak to me.
Yeah I do agree with you - it's a lovely interior and a nice drive. But the efficiency isn't as good as it should be - car like that should be pushing high 4's, into 5 m/kWh is favourable conditions, and it's nowhere near. It was about 14C the day I drove it, mainly on city streets with a few minutes at 50mph and a quick blast along a dual carriageway. It returned 2.6 m/kWh over the one hour drive. Really very poor and the battery heating thing in winter is just bonkers.
I'd have just gone to another dealer, but the disappointing efficiency killed it for me. I could have made a Tour work but then that was withdrawn and I just don't think the 58kWh version would suit my use case.
Not sure what you're after from the car - do you need a longer range because you do long journeys and want to minimise charging away from home, or just bothered about efficiency, but don't necessarily need the long range?
A test drive isn't necessarily the best way to judge efficiency, you end up driving it harder than you normally would as you're testing it out. I had a 32 miles commute this morning, 2 miles of pootling around 40mph roads and then 29 miles doing 75mph on the A19, then a mile mixed driving into the business park 13C, and the journey yielded 3.8 miles oer kWh. On the way back, I cut across to join the A1 back up to Newcastle and go to the Metrocentre to then go home - 51 miles on that journey, about 27 miles doing 75mph and 50mph most of the rest of it, 14C ambient temp 4.1 miles per kWh. On that basis, in decent weather, the ID3 isn't exactly leagues behind the Kias. Ask someone how they're getting 5 miles per kWh in their EV6, it's not very likely they were sat on the motorway doing 75mph, more like 40mph around the doors or a motorway journey strictly adhering to 55-60mph (just from looking at Kia forum entries here). If I were to do a motorway joourney say at 60mph, i'd be doing an easy 4.5 miles per kWh, maybe more.
There used to be someone on the Golf GTI forum I used to be on, showing trip readouts showing 51mpg, but used to sit on the motorway at 58mph to achieve that.
I think it's more of a case that the Kia is marginally better than Ave, rather than the ID3 being worse than average. Our ID3 does seem marginally more efficient than last year, maybe better battery thermal management on software version 2.3 than 2.1 that the xar came with.
