I completed the OS upgrade. I was hoping this update would eliminate many of the issues that have been discussed in the forums. With the number of issues addressed I was hoping for some solid solutions. But so far each change seems to have fallen a little short.
For example:
The ADAS system. This update added a customise-able steering wheel button to take the pain out of having to switch off many different ADAS systems. Great. However the Emergency Lane Keeping ADAS "feature", was not included in the list of features that could be turned off. I still have to go into the settings and switch off the Emergency Lane Keeping before driving.
The much talked about QDLink. I had never used the application before and had seen lots of negative comments. I downloaded the app and on first run it went through the process of asking for permissions. No problems so far. Gave it access to location, media and a few others. But then it asked for access to my contacts. Well I rarely give any app access to my contacts, normally skipping that permission. But QDLink doesn't allow you to do that. You must give it your contacts otherwise it won't let you use it. Now if I am only using QDLink to mirror my device's screen or use an app that has no need to access my contacts then why force the contacts permission? So I didn't get to see if the QDLink app is as bad as people are saying.
The camera recording feature. Excellent, no need to purchase and install a multi-camera dashcam. Recording the full view of the camera is great but it would be nice to have the option of viewing the playback with the fish eye corrected. Like you can when looking at the 360 degree view. But as a dashcam it seems to work well and getting the dashcam ability for free is great.
But the obvious next question is, why not have the ability to record when the car is off? Like the sentry feature in the Tesla. I realise that running the computer when the car is off will consume some power but it couldn't, or at least shouldn't, consume so much power that it becomes an issue. After all, there is a ~70kWh battery in the car. I would expect the computer to consume far less than 50 watts of power. After all it is only performing the camera record function and all other pheriperals should be off when the car is off. But even if it was 50 watts, then for 12 hours it should be roughly 600Wh or 0.6kWh consumed. Thats less than 1% of the cars battery capacity. Even if the computer used five times as much power as I am guessing. As long as it was a feature that could be turned on or off then I am sure there are drivers that would happily give up a percent or two of battery charge in return for always on security cameras.
I will do some longer test drives tomorrow and see how the other features and optimisations perform. I would love for the cruise control to be comfortable so I can get back to using it. In my previous vehicles I used cruise control most of the time. It was a big step backwards when I had to reduce my use of the cruise control. Especially as the car is so quiet that keeping a constant speed manually involves a lot more monitoring of the spedometer. In ICE vehicles you could keep a fairly constant speed manually just by keeping the engine note constant.
