10th Dec 2018, 18:40
Thank you for your comment.
I test drove the latest one, the Sport model (the 2.5 litre); the road noise improvement is marginal, the car is great, very nippy, but... it's a bit cheap and nasty inside (the single speedo instrument cluster looks awfully cheap in my opinion).
The suspension is very lumpy; in NZ there are lots of drain covers that are not flush with the road, and are some cm's deeper than the road surface. This car, rather than smoothing them out, seems to climb in and out of every depression in the road.
In the end, I purchased a Jaguar XF; I learned that most Japanese cars post 2000 are all built cheap and nasty, down to a price. Never having owned a European car before, I drove a Passat, Skoda, Golf, Peugeot 508, and Jaguar XF, and BMW 320. One thing became immediately apparent, all the above cars felt solid, and the sound insulation was way above those Japanese cars I owned; in fact, they make a mention in the sales blurb of reducing noise by fitting "acoustic windshields" etc. The Jag XF was the quietest of them all; not only does it have an acoustically lined windshield, but also has a double engine firewall so you can hardly hear the engine either. I ended up buying that.
15th Apr 2018, 21:00
Interesting review and comments; myself I'm in the United Kingdom and we have some pretty bad roads here as well. Not so much coarse 'chipped' roads, (our motorways are fairly smooth), but country roads and city side streets are awful. To be fair it has been a bad winter and the roads are cracked and full of pot-holes more often than usual. Don't even get me started on the amount of speed-bumps we have! (or 'traffic calming methods' as they call them now). I get that it's for safety, but it is overkill here.
Had a Mazda 626 years ago, a great car but very firm ride which was almost unbearable sometimes. A bit noisy as well. Got a Volvo S60 now, a very smooth quiet car, but still can't always dampen out the roughness of our roads here. Sometimes I think a Rolls-Royce or Bentley would still not be good enough!