For the first time since long, today I was excited of having a one hour drive before getting to work! 🙂 Like a kid with a new toy I was looking forward to driving and having some time to listen to the new noises of the car. For the moment being there is one, which is really, really interesting. Everytime you switch the ignition on, before the engine starts, you hear a metallic “chunk” coming from the back. I believe it might be something to do with the valve of the gas bottles which activates. Aha. I like it.

But now I will stop playing with you guys and post at least one more picture. I actually have done like a ton of pictures but either the reflections or the light conditions made my pictures look bad. While selecting them I almost decided to go back to a real camera and take some decent shots. Truth is that even with phones, if you know how to take pictures, you get amazing results. I need to improve on that.

By continuing the nickname game that we started with La Celestona, its older sister, we decided to baptise the new car La Terrona, which I could translate to “The big earth”. We had laugh when we came up with it…

Driving it is really relaxing. First of all no more noisy differential as main companion. The automatic gearbox lets you forget about the existence of your left leg. Activate the automatic control of the speed and you may as well switch off your head for the next hours. Needless to say, knowing that you are not producing that life threathening particulate while driving makes you feel really light. Finally!

The first thing I have noticed is that while driving down hill, shifting to lower gears does not brake the car by much. I was told that it depends on the compression ratio of the engine, which is different from diesel (my older Octavia) to fuel engines.

You do feel the difference between the two engines: 150 HP of the previous car were definitely more satisfactory during overtakes. With the current 130 HP I have no problems driving in the city, accelerating to get on the motorway… before starting an overtake though, I believe I will now double check if I have time/room enough to perform it.

And range. Range is what keeps my breath hanging as for the moment being the statistics have not enough data to work on and are showing numbers which are not real, in this case, way lower than what it should be. But I believe it might depend also on the quality of the natural gas (now defined as 70% by the on board computer). We will see when I get high quality gas and some more km how the range changes. I am expecting of having at least 400 km range while running on natural gas and 200 km more while running on fuel. We will see if it reaches that high values in the next episodes.

Have a good week everyone, enjoy your holidays… if you have time, go hunting for some noises, ahah! 🙂 I should try to record that misterious, initial “chunk”…