WANTED: Interesting daily driver

[sarg]

I had a DS7 Crossback on 24 hour test drive Friday/Saturday.

Before you laugh, I needed to do an airport run with luggage, the Mini just ain't up to that job, so it was a handy offer of a free loaner, and something that I might have considered as a daily driver.

Here's my observations, particularly around adaptive cruise control

Likes:

1. Anyone with an SUV will know the problem of the back of your trousers getting dirty when you get out. The doors of this car have been designed to cover the whole of the bottom of the car, sills included, so they are kept mostly clean so your trousers stay clean.

2. Loads of standard kit including adaptive LED headlights (not matrix though), adaptive cruise, massage driver seat, power everything, heated AND ventilated front seats, BLIS, lane assist, night vision wireless phone charging, etc etc. The car could basically drive itself.

3. Love the ventilated seats. I'm always too warm, so these were a big thumbs up from me

4. Focal hifi speakers, whilst not top class, were very decent for the standard of car.

5. Leather (or Alcantara on some models) everywhere, including most of the dashboard

6. I drove the 180PS diesel Ultra Prestige version. The car drives well, honeslty has enough power for the style of car, and suspension rides very comfortably.

Dislikes:

1. The controls for heating, ventilation, navigation, etc are touch screen or voice controlled only. I don't like touch screen anyway, if the car hits a bump, you touch the wrong part of the screen, plus it means taking your eyes off the road for too long in my opinion. But, if you're going to have it, the voice control has to work well, and it just doesn't in this car. Heathrow Terminal 5? No sir. Coombe Abbey? Nope. In a nutshell, it works best with a postcode, which is great when you have the postcode, not so good when you don't. This is the key reason this car is definitely off my shortlist, could not live with this.

2. The adaptive cruise. Now, this is my first experience of ACC, but I found it utterly annoying and watned to turn it off and just have normal cruise.

At town speeds, say up to 40mph, I found the car got far too close to a slowing car in front before slowing down, despite me setting the distance to the longest possible.

At motorway speeds, it was the complete opposite, slowing the car down far too early, despite me changing the distance setting to the shortest possible. I found my self having to change lanes to overtake, without the ACC slowing me down, far far earlier than I would do normally.

So, I'm interested to know why you all like it so much, is the Audi ACC all that different from this?

3. The price is utterly crazy, car I tried is circa £42k.

4. Cannot be specced with 4wd??? Just stupid

Summary:

They're the only real dislikes really. Car can be specced cheaper and without ACC, so could get over those issues, but the whole touch screen infotainment ruined the car for me, and I have a horrible suspicion I'm going to feel the same about the D5.

Other than that, the car is thoroughly decent, especially for a motorway cruiser, but needs to be 10k cheaper than it is in my opinion.