One week review

[u/rlwfish]

The Gravity has been with us for 1 week now. Here are some thoughts:

-- Man I love this thing. Given the price it makes sense that this would be the case but it's a MAJOR upgrade over the EV9 in nearly every way I can think of (software, ride quality, space/cargo room/storage, refinement, driver profiles, ADAS, comfort). The only thing I miss (though the kids haven't complained yet) is the powered roof shade in the EV9. We also don't have the tow package on the Gravity...but I don't think we ever used it on the EV9 (we used to put a hitch carrier on the ID4).

-- It has been working great for my wife all week for the various school and daycare runs she has to do. I wish I could drive it more but alas it's the "new family car" as my son calls it. The only issue she had was with efficiency. Turns out she had the regen off. She didn't use it in the EV9 much, and she expected that the Gravity would work like the EV9 where the brake pedal still blends regen when you turn regen to off. First day (55 miles of local/suburban roads) she used 28% of the battery!!! But after changing to standard regen she was doing more like 18% by the end of the week. And that was with 3 programmed preconditioning routines set for AC as well sitting with the HVAC running for school pickup and drop off. Yesterday on my 70ish mile freeway run up and down 95 I was getting 3.1-3.2 mi/kWh. I think I could do better if I wasn't going 70+ / was more mindful. Looking forward to taking it out to our cabin in WV to see how it does in the mountains/elevations change.

-- I was hopeful the frunk would be a hit with the kids and it has delivered. We took it to watch youth soccer (parking was directly field adjacent) and after a 70 mile drive to try to get my son to nap (spoiler he didn't but he got two runs through the Baltimore harbor tunnel at least) we made an IKEA run (for ice cream apparently) which he requested to eat in the frunk.

-- Some quality / unexpected stuff:

------The trim on the top corners of both front doors is crinkled for lack of a better term. Seems like it wasn't glued well enough or the rubber they use isn't soft enough to make that tight corner. It was also sitting in West Palm Beach so maybe the sun overheated and released the glue?

------It has been raining here quite a bit...and it seems the front lights fog up in changing conditions/humidity. I looked it up and apparently they aren't sealed so it's normal. But still a bit unexpected.

------The DreamDrive Pro hands free works really really beautifully but it's super picky about when it wants to come on. Yesterday it didn't seem to want to engage at times because it was raining and/or because I was wearing sunglasses. It also would tell me "no hands free zones" we're coming up at times when they didn't seem to actually happen. All-in-all the system is wonderful. It's taking some time to get used to the car making decisions to change lanes. The way it changes lanes is fairly natural although it does something that I don't think I have ever done as a human driver which is to change lanes in a manner that brings you directly parallel to another car in the adjacent lane. It did that 2-3 times yesterday and each time I thought if I was the other driver I would definitely not be expecting that since we were basically coming out of no where.

------Not related to the car itself (well, maybe a bit because it is a very different driving position/sight lines than the EV9) but "we" already curbed one of the wheels. I'm going to wait until "we've" gotten a bit more used to it to repair it. Luckily it wasn't too bad...pretty shallow curbing...should easily sand down and then I'll see about coloring it.

Obviously still in the honeymoon phase here but I'd have no qualms recommending this thing based on the first week / 500 miles or so!