Farewell BZ4X

[gingertips]

Left my job, so had to give back my BZ4X Pure.

Very sad to see it go - was a lovely car to drive & I will miss it. The list below are the annoyances that Toyota could sort. For many people, Im sure most of these wont be an issue & that my username really needs to be princess&thepea

• Initial range - 330 miles. Reality in winter was half that.  Settled on around 240 miles in spring.  The industry needs to be made to get real about a realistic range in their marketing literature
• £40k for this car? Ouch!
• For long journies, the journey became a much nicer event as we would plan a stop somewhere where there's a fast charger & somewhere nearby for a decent lunch/stop!  Found some brilliant pubs doing this & I loved the fact that it forced you to put some effort into finding somewhere nice to take a break, instead of that desire to get to your destination as quickly as possible
• No rear windscreen wiper.  My rear windscreen was always smeared & it definitely needs a rear wiper
• Seats don't have much depth & had to raise my seat significantly as am 6ft1 & long legs. This meant getting in I would always be hitting my head on roof door.  Especially true of the rear seat - lots of legroom but little support for people with long legs
• Great infotainment system but No Android Auto. Tried many 3rd party options but none worked continually, so had to settle with small right angled USB cable.  They really need to sort this along with the phone holder.
• Infotainment would frequently log out of Toyota website & require you to rekey the password (which due to security settings has to be alpha numerics & a character). So meant having to pull over or put up with a nagware warning screen reappearing while driving which is very distracting.  I think maybe this might have happened when starting the vehicle with no mobile signal, but cant be sure
• 1 foot pedal driving - tried & decided I didn't like 
• Phone holder too small for a larger phone connected to USB & being able to close the drawer.  Thankfully I have a  pixel 6 which is small footprint
• Don't like the black shiny finish inside - scratches too easily & constantly has fingerprints all over it!
• Centre armrest comfortable, but door armrests need more padding & were uncomfortable on long journies
• Couldn't turn off rear seat belt alarms - if you put anything of weight on backseat then you would have to use seatbelts as well! Accept this might be legislation forcing this, but there should be ability for this to be disabled?
• Rear parcel "shelf" is rubbish & there are massive gaps everywhere. Skoda have a much better cassette type system.
• Big boot, but lack of boot storage options - would be nice to have a couple of removable dividers to create a space to put 1 or 2 shopping bags by the wheel arches
• Connecting the charger up sometimes resulted in charger not being connected - there is clearly an issue with the connector/cable provided & been reported elsewhere on here
• No proper storage place for charging cable.  I'd love to see them make space in the bonnet for the type 2 connector cable, as not all charging points have installed charging cables. Under boot is not really an option when you have lots of luggage
• Extremely rough ride on country roads - feeling every single bump. Seemed to be fine around town & on motorways.
• Windows let in a lot of noise - I know its not a Lexus, but it did feel noisy at times.
• Dashboard creaks & squeaks after a couple of months.  As I knew I was returning the car, I didn't bother getting sorted, but it became an annoyance on long journies.
• Bottle holders in doors are just moulded plastic, so bottles would rattle.  Better would be a softer plastic, or with a rubber coating etc like other vehicles.  My 10 year old Octavia had better drinks holders
• No glove box & no tidy storage options!  The bottom console area feels like a waste how its designed & I didn't use it often!
• Adaptive Cruise Control worked well - as did lane assist.  However, the lane assist warning was poor. I would have both hands on steering wheel & no need to make corrections on motorways, yet it felt obliged to force me to make a correction & if I didn't would turn off the lane assist which is likely more of a risk!
• Sign recognition for speed was very hit & miss. I don't know what its like in other cars, but I found it could be very misleading & I doubt a police officer/court would accept that as a reason for speeding
• Rear camera was great for basic car. Id like to see it have a front camera as well, along with remote view (handy for parking in car parks to see when a charging bay becomes empty!) 
• Steering felt solid. Got used to how it covers up the console dashboard
• Aircon worked well - remote aircon great using keyfob.  But disappointing it kicks off immediately you unlock the car!
• Hubcaps poorly fitted from factory, trying to put air in tyres was very hard to do!
• Using app to set climate control would always fail in the mornings - would try 3/4 times & end up resorting to using keyfob.  App overall is poor, would frequently log out or unable to connect to car.  

Could never get the overnight charging continually working with Octopus & myenergi v2.  Each time we had been away & I tried to set it to only charge overnight it would fail, so would end up waiting up til 11.30 pm to manually charge!  This is likely to be a fault/issue with the charger not the car

Would I get another?  Maybe, but think I would definitely try out the competition next time.  Theyve got a lot right with the BZ4X, but there's room for tweaking!

Appreciated all the support & guidance I received on the forum - thank you.

[Bper]

Hi Richard,well not many problems then😂what car are you looking to get now or is that subject to your new job. Trust you will stay on the forum and offer advice from your experience of your BZ4X no problem car.

[gingertips]

On 5/30/2024 at 10:25 AM, Bper said:

Hi Richard,well not many problems then😂what car are you looking to get now or is that subject to your new job. Trust you will stay on the forum and offer advice from your experience of your BZ4X no problem car.

Not sure. Have to wait 3 months before I can order another car through salary sacrifice.  But it will definitely be an EV.  I ordered a bz4x purely because it was an absolute bargain - a month later the monthly rental increased by 50%

[forkingabout]

On 5/30/2024 at 9:55 AM, gingertips said:

Initial range - 330 miles. Reality in winter was half that.  Settled on around 240 miles in spring.  The industry needs to be made to get real about a realistic range in their marketing literature

Car manufacturers can legally only quote the official WLTP figures - blame the rule makers on that one.

[philip42h]

1 hour ago, forkingabout said:

Car manufacturers can legally only quote the official WLTP figures - blame the rule makers on that one.

That's not entirely true. Legally car manufacturers MUST quote the official WLTP figures (and we know that those aren't usefully realistic). But they can also quote any other more helpful figures that they wish to. Toyota have a helpful range calculator and I've seen similar from Skoda.