A nice looking car with that new car smell, a flash touch screen interface with a very important GPS for all our navigational needs.
Driving off from the airport depot, everything felt good - a nice car to drive, although the electronic handbrake (I guess it's now a finger brake) took some time to get used to. Then it was into the mad Paris traffic, which was even more madder than usual due to a public transport strike.
I found out that Parisian drivers do not have an atom of patience in their bodies. Any form of queue (i.e. 2 or so cars waiting in a row) and they feel the need to push in. This meant that our one-lane exit off the motorway was 5 cars wide at the bottleneck and growing! They don't seem to care about blocking the motorway to get a position or two ahead - not what I needed after a long haul flight. But enough of my whinging, this is about the car and the GPS worked a treat guiding us through all the mayhem with a soothing female UK accent - I think we're going to be good friends...and I think I like this PURRgeot.
We were driving to our second stop in France along the fantastic French motorways, bopping along to the B52, when all of a sudden the music stopped and the GPS screen blanked out! A few seconds later "Peugeot" appeared on the touch screen!
The Peugeot controls interface had decided to reboot itself mid drive - must be windows based! Anyway 30s or so later our music was back and the GPS was continuing to guide us to our destination. OK. Just a small glitch, I thought, probably wont happen again...
Wrong! Does it roughly every one or two days but luckily most times were soon after starting the car and whilst I was programming the next address into the GPS - annoying, but not at critical times.
Worse was yet to come... it was a hot day (35-40 degrees) and we were on a long drive along a motorway in the south of France. The GPS was showing that we needed to take the exit 10km ahead. I had driven for a few kms when I checked the screen again - take the exit 10km ahead still? The bloody system had frozen! We left the motorway and stopped in a supermarket carpark, turned the ignition off, waited 5-10s, turned it on again.... bloody thing is still frozen! And because the touch screen controls the music volume and air-conditioning, these were stuck on our "loud and blasting air" motorway settings and we could do nothing to change them!!!
Tried turning off the ignition for a bit longer (~10mins) - still frozen. Time to call the Peugeot emergency assistance number. Dialed the number - line connected, beep... then it disconnected? Tried again - line connected, "hello?", beep, disconnected!
This was my first of many "BLOODY POO-GEOT!!!" days.
Couldn't get through but after about 30mins with the car in the shade the Peugeot system booted OK.
So in a couple of months driving the POO-geot, the touch screen system has frozen up (requiring us to rest the poor baby for half an hour in the shade) about 7-8 times. It still crashes and reboots itself pretty much every 1 or 2 days, and now another fault is rearing its ugly head - the GPS is starting to fail!
It goes into la-la land and can't work out where we are. It has shown us driving out into the Mediterranean, and one other time I thought we were in ground-hog day as it would continually repeat itself showing us driving through a town that we had already passed through miles back!
"in 200m, turn left....in 200m, turn left....in 200m, turn left....in 200m, turn left....in 200m, turn left...."
Luckily I had brought my own trusty tomtom GPS from home so I've rigged that one up as a backup. Never fails. Really! It is 6 years older than the Poogeot GPS and it just works.
In all our driving through Europe, I've discovered that the brand new Peugeot GPS has very very old maps. It tries to guide me down roads that no longer exist (and obviously haven't for many many years), down one-way roads - the wrong way!, and even once tried to guide me over a footbridge.
The fun doesn't stop there... after leaving the car parked in a seemingly quiet street we returned to find the rear fender dented and scratched.
All fun times... but no, I wont be looking in to buy a POO-geot back home.
Oh dear what an experience. Bloody cars eh
ReplyDeleteI love the smell of a brand new car, and that feeling of getting behind the wheel for the first time. However, I am sorry the touch screen portion of the car started to glitch and freeze up. It is a good thing you had your own GPS with you, and I hope the car you own now is reliable.
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