Update 4
Recently, I got talking to a software engineer whose job it was to pore over the data showing how many features and options customers actually use within their cars.
It won’t surprise you to learn that most people don’t use most things and, beyond an early exploration of some key functions and preference settings, a lot of things stay hidden away undiscovered.
The life of a motoring journalist involves exploration of all these different menus and features, yet even weeks and months into a test like this, things can come as a surprise.
In the Scenic, I went hunting for a creep function for the transmission and came away with a cure for my hay fever. Regarding the former, I had found low-speed manoeuvring, particularly parallel parking, very tricky to do, as the surge of torque jolts you forward and backwards without any finesse.
I thought this was because the car was being held by an auto-hold function, so I went hunting for an off switch, but instead, because the regenerative braking was set to maximum, it held the car in a similar way.
Pulling the steering wheel paddles that control this to turn the regen down at stationary had the car creeping forward in a much more controllable manner. Problem solved.
The Scenic is unusual in keeping the regen setting how you left it when you last got out of the car, rather than resetting, like in Volkswagen Group and Hyundai Group EVs.
To be fair, the Renault way is the more desirable way of doing it, as in those other brands’ cars you typically only notice the absence of regen slowing you down as you approach your first corner.
If an auto hold function was in the system somewhere, I couldn’t find it amid all those menus. Google solved the problem for me anyway, pointing me to a post on the Scenic owners’ page – and at the very top of that was a post about hay fever.
Someone had highlighted the ‘air purifier’ function in the car as the pollen count skyrocketed during the early-April heatwave.
By
