Driving
What is it like on the road?
The turbo petrol engine smears its torque over a wide range, so responds well from low down. It also sings sweetly and quietly at the top end. But annoyingly, at 4,000rpm, which is what you use a lot when pressing on, it drones annoyingly.
Just mooching around towns, or in gentle traffic, the CVT is smooth and sane, choosing a ratio that plays to the engine’s low-rev strengths. And yeah, we know CVTs are efficient and light. But floor it and, as they all do, it causes the engine to moan like a dying cow, abandoning correlation between speed and revs, and the reponse to throttle inputs is fuzzy. That makes it irksome and disconcerting to use.
For driving down twisty roads, where you want predictable response through a corner, it’s entirely critical to fix it in one of the the eight virtual ratios via the paddles.
The steering is oddly weighted around the straightahead, so it’s easy to drift out of your motorway lane. It’s like driving in slush. Then you get to a corner or roundabout, probably too fast if you’ve not taken control of the CVT because there’s then no engine braking. So you yank the wheel and the car rolls onto the outside-front wheel, and then you get back on the throttle and there’s more CVT delay before you finally lurch your way out.
On the inside
Layout, finish and space
The Eclipse Cross carves a lot of people space from its compact footprint. You sit in the usual throne-like crossover attitude up front. Out back, there’s top-class leg room, and foot space under the front seats. Enough headroom too (just), but then you couldn’t expect more when you see the roof-line.
Open up the tailgate and the reason becomes clear. The boot isn’t very big. Not fore-to-aft because the rear seats are set well back, nor indeed top-to-bottom because the luggage blind is set low down so you can see out of the spilt rear window.
There’s an answer. You can slide the back seat bench forward, either one-third, two-thirds or all of it. This adds boot space, although this leaves endless possibilities for small clutter to disappear into the seat sliding mechanism, never to be seen again. The rolled up blind stores under the floor, handily.
The strongly three-dimensional dashboard emerges at you in a series of tiers, like the architecture of a sports stadium. It looks good, though does force some compromises, like hiding the climate controls in a deep dark recess. Still, at least they are proper controls, not virtual ones lost behind layers of screen menus.
Some of the other switchgear is scattered around with little apparent clarity or logic. By the time you’ve rooted around and found the lane departure or collision warning system switches, you might have already had the collision.
The dials and screens are clear enough, and top versions have a head-up display. Infotainment is controlled by a touchscreen or well-designed trackpad controller down in the centre console. Mirroring of Apple or Android phones is standard, just to add to the user-friendliness.
from www.topgear.com
