Hyundai Inster at 1000 miles

We have just passed the 1000-mile mark, so here are my thoughts on the Inster.

Buying a car in February is not usually a good idea, but for us, in a year with little ice and snow, it has worked out quite well.

Looks	"It looks like a toy", my son said when he first saw it in a car park.  It is a small car.  Other than that its quirky and you either like it or not.  I don't particularly, but it's easy to spot in a car park, and there aren't that many of them.
Capacity	One of the requirements was that it would carry all our tools to the allotment.  Spade, fork, hoe, strimmer - etc.  It is more than capable of that.  The door pockets, though, are too slim to carry a standard de-icing, tool and there is almost no storage space around the front. It is a 4 seater, there is no way you could get 5 in it.
Ride	The car generally is comfortable, and deals with the bumps well for its size.  It is generally stable and corners well.  It doesn't like speed bumps though.
Range	There are options for a longer range - 229 miles.  We judged the cost to be too much for a relatively little gain.  Our range is approximately 200 miles when the car is fully charged.  That's from 100% to 0%.  You'll never get to zero so in reality the range is about 180 miles
Running cost	We are currently running at 4.3 miles/kWh, which is pretty good.  We normally run in ECO mode (there are 4 modes: Normal, Sport, Snow, ECO) except when we forget, as it always defaults to Normal.  ECO mode cannot be pre-set.  This is a failure of the design.
Charging	So far we have only charged at home.  Our old pod-point does the job very nicely - it charges at up to 7kW - the maximum for a home charger.  A charge from 25%-80% takes about 5 hours.  The pod-point was installed before all the 'smart' chargers were available, so having a charging timer on the car is very important.  The instructions we were originally given by the sales team were incorrect.  No surprise there, their promises of after sales support are entirely hollow, but that is sadly normal. However, they are not entirely to blame for it taking me 800+ miles to work it out.  The menus on the car are dumb.  There are two EV icons.  One sets the max charging percentage (normally 80%).  The other allows a timer to be set.  It is unnecessarily complicated, requiring a departure time so be set, a cheap rate time to be set and an option to only charge in cheap rate.  We have none of that, and even if we did, we wouldn't necessarily want the car to be in charge.  I like to charge when my house battery is reasonably full, and it's a sunny day.  That's the cheapest way for me.  There is also an option to reduce the charge rate - which would mean we could get more from the sun, I haven't tried this yet.
Driver Aids	There is a vast array of mainly poor driver aids. Speed limit warning (road sign recognition) The car scans for road signs and sets the speed limits accordingly, If I breach the speed limit there is a beeping until I return to the correct speed.  So far it has been wrong many times.  Sometimes, it reads '30' as '80', which is above the maximum speed limit in the UK.  Other times it picks up the speed limit signs on the slip road that I have not taken at a junction, then beeps for ages. It will also recognise warning signs - school, bend, etc.  However, it completely fails to recognise traffic lights.  Lane Tracking The lane tracking can be advisory, or active, when it will turn the wheel.  This works well enough on a dual carriage road with good markings. However, the car performs 'course corrections' every couple of seconds; I find the wheel moving that frequently to be very disconcerting.  It is most annoying on a narrow single track road, when it is trying to keep the car in the centre of the lane, despite my need to stay close to the left curb to avoid the oncoming articulated lorry, or move away from the side of the road to avoid the pot-hole pit that would damage the car. It gets very confused when a lane splits into two. It will follow one of them, and needs to be firmly overridden. Distance Management The car will allow the use of its forward radar to track the car in front.  It will stop when the car in front stops.  To get it to start again you must press a button.  It will accelerate and decelerate, keeping the distance reasonably stable, but not exceeding your set speed limit.  If the car in front changes lane, turns off the road, or turns onto a roundabout, the car will react to the empty space in front of it, and accelerate quite fast. On a 50mph road, the car in front slowed to approximately 20 MPH and turned left.  The Inster slowed to maybe 5MPH, and took 4-5 seconds to decide it was safe to accelerate.  On two occasions it has simply forgotten to slow down, and I have had to perform an emergency stop. Cyclists and motor cyclists are not recognised. Once a low trailer was not recognised. Collision Avoidance When the car thinks that it is about to collide with something, the right-hand dial (that measures power use or recovery)  flashes red with 'collision' or some such message in it.  Mostly this is not an issue, there will be no collision.  Once or twice, when there may have been a collision, the alert has not occurred. Driver Attention - you are being watched There are two 'driver attention' warnings. One says keep your hands on the wheel.  Mostly that is a good warning, but it occurs occasionally when it shouldn't.  Mostly, I don't always hold the steering wheel like I'm hanging on for dear life. The other is the 'eyes on the road warning', which occurs mainly on a bright sunny day, when my head is held in such away that I can see the road through the glare. There is one other that I have only seen once - the 'take a break' warning. I have no idea what triggers this, I assume it 'thinks' I'm going to sleep.
Security	For a car to be secure, it must be reasonably difficult to steal, but allow easy access to its owner.  Superficially this is true, but there are a few missing tricks on the ease of use front.  The most notable is that it is possible to lock the key inside the car!  This is a "back to the 1970's" security failure, but now we know, we will adjust our behaviour accordingly.  The other security feature I don't like is the need to unlock the car to access the charging port.  There are times when this could be unhelpful.  The odd thing is that it automatically locks the car when the cable is unplugged, not when the charging port door is closed. I don't know how easy it is to steal, but as It's not exactly a desirable motor, I doubt I will ever find out. The rear door is on a separate locking/unlocking mechanism and isn't part of the main car.