Driving the Renault Koleos
Jan. 13th, 2024 07:53 amAustralia Travelog #45
SYD Airport - Sun, 31 Dec 2023, 11am
We're back at Sydney Airport now, awaiting our flight home this afternoon. The drive here was fairly uneventful. So was the process of returning our rental car— which I drove now a total of over 700km in the wrong-side-of-the-road driving environment of Australia. As I noted previously (see linked blog) driving on the wrong side wasn't as hard as I thought it might be. But how was our rental car, the Renault Koleos? Well, after several days and 700km here are my/our thoughts:

I will start with the negatives. There are a lot of things we disliked about this car.
Yeah, a much shorter list of positives than negatives. Good riddance to this French piece of crap.
SYD Airport - Sun, 31 Dec 2023, 11am
We're back at Sydney Airport now, awaiting our flight home this afternoon. The drive here was fairly uneventful. So was the process of returning our rental car— which I drove now a total of over 700km in the wrong-side-of-the-road driving environment of Australia. As I noted previously (see linked blog) driving on the wrong side wasn't as hard as I thought it might be. But how was our rental car, the Renault Koleos? Well, after several days and 700km here are my/our thoughts:

I will start with the negatives. There are a lot of things we disliked about this car.
- Apple CarPlay integration was buggy. It refused to connect for ~45 minutes on the first day as the whole infotainment got ridiculously unresponsive and ultimately rebooted itself.
- Continuously variable transmission is very loud. At highway speed it drones like a jet engine. On the first day I worried the car had some mechanical problem and would break down on us. Unclear if this is terrible design or just a maintenance issue.
- Poor acceleration.
- Irritating nav system voice warnings that cannot be turned off without also disabling Apple CarPlay voice instructions.
- Fake SUV (no AWD/4wd). This is especially weird in Australia where we noticed lots of other SUVs with not just 4x4 drivetrains but also factory-installed snorkels. (You only see these on extreme after-market modified rigs in the US.)
- Four small cup holders. Even a slender, Australian-sized drink can doesn't fit in two of them. Why not offer 2 reasonably sized slots instead of 4 undersized ones?
- Worst implementation of cruise control I've seen in a car manufactured since 1983. It has a major hysteresis problem. It would fail to maintain speed on any kind of uphill, dropping 5 km/h below the target, then "downshift" aggressively and overshoot the target speed by 5 km/h. Repeatedly.
- Poor gas mileage considering how weeny the powertrain is. It got the US equivalent of 22 mpg in mostly highway driving. A Jeep Grand Cherokee we rented in the US a few months ago did better.
- The SUV body style (even without the SUV traction of AWD) gave us a comfortable seating position and ease of stowing bags in the back.
- It has heated seats.
Yeah, a much shorter list of positives than negatives. Good riddance to this French piece of crap.