How Does it Drive?

It’s not exactly a spirited car to punt around, despite having a ‘Sport’ mode in the Drive Mode selection. However the Avante is smooth and very little vibration can be felt in the cabin. In fact the push button starter is so seamless and quietly activated that the car almost starts up like a hybrid.

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The official 0 to 100km/h sprint time is 10.4 seconds, which is what most mainstream South Korean and Japanese cars manage these days. But then when you compare it against something like the similarly priced 1.4-litre turbo Skoda Octavia that covers the same sprint in 8.2 seconds it seems a little lacking.

Still, the Avante isn’t about speed and more about comfortable cruising and that it manages to do pretty well. The suspension is well-damped and cornering ability is excellent through long curves that typically have lesser front-wheel drive cars struggling with understeer. The suspension appears to have pretty soft bump damping though, so a quick dash over a speed bump can see the suspension bottom out on the bump stops.

The IVT can lock into eight sequential forward gears with a nudge of the gear lever to the right for sport mode. It’ll provide a more engaging drive and improved engine braking on long descents, but in practice it’s unlikely to be a feature that will be used much. 

Where the Avante really shines though, is in its highly comprehensive safety package. And we do mean seriously comprehensive, which is what raised the price tag over the competition. 

The real star is the Smart Cruise Control, which uses radar sensors to maintain the safety gap to the car ahead and on the Elite variant with Stop & Go, it can automatically stop the car when the vehicle ahead stops. Even now, this is typically an optional feature on higher-spec continental cars but here it is on the Avante as standard equipment. 

The big paradigm shift you’ll need to have is to understand that this hugely advanced system is distilled down to just a few buttons on the steering wheel, and that there is almost no need to drive the car under certain highway conditions in the traditional sense. 

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A button cycles through four safety distance presets, so choose one that you’re comfortable with, click the toggle switch to set the fastest speed you want the car to go, press the Smart Cruise Control switch to ‘on’, and take your foot off the accelerator. The car takes over from here. It’s amazingly good in two kinds of situations: a smooth highway cruise and long start-stop tailbacks. 

If you’re having moments of anxiety on whether or not the Avante can actually sense the car in front of you and not just drive straight into its rear, the instrument cluster actually shows a graphic of what the car is sensing and how it’s tracking the vehicle ahead. It’s accurate and so smooth that your passengers will likely not realise that you are not actually driving the car. Even if another car cuts into the gap in front of you, the system will smoothly apply the brakes or lift the throttle until the preset safety gap is restored. 

You’ll still need to be aware of unpredictable, crazy drivers and be prepared to take over the controls, and the car’s cruise control system will deactivate once driver input on the pedals is detected. As a whole system, it’s seriously good, and once you learn to trust what it can do, you will never go back to ‘normal’ driving again. 

Then there are the Lane Following Assist and Lane Keeping Assist functions, once again usually only found as optional equipment in higher specification luxury cars. In summary, the car’s external sensors will track lane markings and the car ahead, then provide low power steering assistance to help the car track in the centre of the lane. It’s not autonomous in that you do need to keep your hands on the steering wheel, but you’ll certainly feel the inputs when you’re not driving the car accurately. 

Other active safety features include blind spot warning and rear cross traffic warning sensors. Plus, we discovered another cool trick in which the rear parking camera can be activated via a switch on the centre console and left as it is while you drive, giving you an additional rear view ‘mirror’. 

Continue to Page 4: Conclusion and Video

Page 1: Intro
Page 2: Interior
Page 3: Driving Experience
Page 4: Conclusion and Video Review

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