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Took Delivery of an ARIYA three weeks ago

6K views 20 replies 6 participants last post by  Marko5333 
#1 · (Edited)
After a lot of thinking I traded in my five year old TESLA Model S and took delivery of an ARIYA (EVOLVE). I live in Belgium, Ive driven it for about 3000K in the last three weeks, I thought I would share a few impressions.

Generally speaking the ARIYA is a much better build than the TESLA was.
Everything fits and closes the way it should.
Inside the cabin is well appointed and everything works. No squeaks or ill fitting trim. Nissan went a long way to deaden all the obvious sounds.
The doors swing shut and "plop" closed, no hammering required.
The windows deaden the outside noises, and there is little road noise with a ride that is quiet and serene. Even at high speeds!
No there is no Frunk.. that space is full of airconditioning, 12Volt systems and the tanks for fluids. TESLA hides those all away, so you get a big space to carry more clutter around in. The tradeoff with the ARIYA? You can access all that "stuff" if you need to and dont have to take half the car apart to get to them.

The ARIYA has doors with window frames. Take it from someone that lives in a country where it freezes during the winter, thats a big plus. The door glass cannot freeze and stick to the chassis - which was a big issue with the TESLA. If it rained and then the temperature dropped to below freezing you could not open the doors - to do so the window glass has to drop a little to stop the glass from catching on the roof sill. Cant happen with ARIYA.

There is plenty of room in the cabin and the seats are very comfortable. Plenty of room on the back bench and there is big trunk. However it has a high floor which meets the back bumper. For some thats fine. It means you dont have to lift anything into or out of the trunk.. Im not a fan, things slide around and you run the risk of items falling out when opening the tailgate. There is a solution. There is a compartment under the floor of the trunk. There are two "boards" that cover it. If you remove them then there is a space which is ideal for putting shooping or other smaller items that are prone to becomming mobile in - effectively eliminating the problem.

The trunk has a cover, which is good becuse it hides your stuff - and it can be removed and stowed under the "floor boards" where it fits perfectly. Its not so great if you have anything thats a bit bulky because there is not a lot of height between the floor and aforementioned cover. Either you remove the cover, or if you want to keep things out of sight, remove the floor "boards" to gain some space.

The ARIYA Evolve has all the creature comforts you can think off. The trunk can be opened with a "wave" of your foot if your hands are full, there are blind spot warning indicators, walk away and walk up locking and unlocking (turn on or off in the menus) together with a load of settings to allow you to customise the display or driving style.

ADDED this: ONE-PEDAL driving. It seems a lot of drivers are used to this. The ARIYA does not have the same one-pedal driving that the TESLA or the LEAF have/had. Nissan calls it E-PEDAL ... there is a button for it on the center armrest. If you set it "on" then its only for the duration of the drive. If you want to have it active all the time then you need to set it in the menu (from the drivers screen). Here is the catch, E-PEDAL will not bring the car to a complete standstill, the driver needs to touch the brake to come to a complete stop. AND you need to set the brake-hold setting to "on" (its a button on to the lower left of the steering wheel) if you want the brakes to hold the car in place after its come to a standstill. - otherwise it will "creep". And no there is no setting to turn off "creep" mode. Dont know why. One advantage to having to use the brakes to come to a complete standstill is that the disks will not rust. This was a big issue with my TESLA.

And then there is the onboard software. As much as I love the car, the software seems to be just a bit off. I am a computer guy (a bit older now) so I gave myself sometime to get used to the new way of doing things. I've come across two sorts of issues - works as designed but NOT as desired, and the sort where its just broken. Here are a couple of examples. There is a setting to make getting in and out of the car easier - Im not a big guy so I probably dont need it, but hey - it rolls the drivers seat and steering wheel back to provide easier entry and exit from the drivers side. Turn the car off, open the door and before you step out ARIYA has done its thing. It seems to take things bit to far because if a passenger side occupant opens their door first, ARIYA seems to think the driver is going to get out too and promptly pushes everyhting out of the way - even if the driver has no intention of exiting the car.
Then there are the memory settings for two different drivers (and the same again for front passengers), There is a fabulously comfortable lower back adjustment - the setting of which, for reasons only NISSAN will know, is never committed to memory. Every time you get back into the car, the lower support reset to maximum!
There seem to be issues with bluetooth, an example: if my connected phone is streaming any audio source and I try to use the ARIYA SATNAV .. about five minutes in the SATNAV freezes.

There is more, but I wont bore you. Lets just hope NISSAN is listening and puts its software guys back to work.

Hope my mssiv helps if you are considering the ARIYA.
 
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#2 ·
Congrats on your Ariya!!! I'm here in the states waiting patiently , but at this point I said let me stop thinking about it and just wait until February to say finally I got my Ariya. I did purchase my wallbox yesterday and the 150 discount is still valid. Thanks for the great write up!!!
 
#4 ·
Well (as another software guy 👋...)
The problems you describe seem all to be software related... I will say though, your mention of the MAX lumbar support everytime will really annoy me :-(. Our Ariya evole should arrive 31/3/2023, at 504000 DKK (~€68000).. I'm really hoping that all this gets fixed asap with an update.
 
#5 · (Edited)
I thought long and hard about buying another TESLA... in the end I settled on the NISSAN, even though the price differentail between the ARIYA and the MODEL Y is quite small.
I am not really optimisitc about getting fixes for the software... NISSAN has no direct path to report the issues. Our garage told me I needed to lodge guarantee claims and then these would go back to NISSAN. I am keeping a list and plan to hand it in sometime soon. I have also been experiencing some very inconsistant bahaviour with Andorid Auto, the onboard voice recognition is really bad, so I use google, but that cant seem to decide if it should use the speakers in the car.. or on the phone... its all very irritating!!
 
#6 ·
After a lot of thinking I traded in my five year old TESLA Model S and took delivery of an ARIYA (EVOLVE). I live in Belgium, Ive driven it for about 3000K in the last three weeks, I thought I would share a few impressions.

Generally speaking the ARIYA is a much better build than the TESLA was.
Everything fits and closes the way it should.
Inside the cabin is well appointed and everything works. No squeaks or ill fitting trim. Nissan went a long way to deaden all the obvious sounds.
The doors swing shut and "plop" closed, no hammering required.
The windows deaden the outside noises, and there is little road noise with a ride that is quiet and serene. Even at high speeds!
No there is no Frunk.. that space is full of airconditioning, 12Volt systems and the tanks for fluids. TESLA hides those all away, so you get a big space to carry more clutter around in. The tradeoff with the ARIYA? You can access all that "stuff" if you need to and dont have to take half the car apart to get to them.

The ARIYA has doors with window frames. Take it from someone that lives in a country where it freezes during the winter, thats a big plus. The door glass cannot freeze and stick to the chassis - which was a big issue with the TESLA. If it rained and then the temperature dropped to below freezing you could not open the doors - to do so the window glass has to drop a little to stop the glass from catching on the roof sill. Cant happen with ARIYA.

There is plenty of room in the cabin and the seats are very comfortable. Plenty of room on the back bench and there is big trunk. However it has a high floor which meets the back bumper. For some thats fine. It means you dont have to lift anything into or out of the trunk.. Im not a fan, things slide around and you run the risk of items falling out when opening the tailgate. There is a solution. There is a compartment under the floor of the trunk. There are two "boards" that cover it. If you remove them then there is a space which is ideal for putting shooping or other smaller items that are prone to becomming mobile in - effectively eliminating the problem.

The trunk has a cover, which is good becuse it hides your stuff - and it can be removed and stowed under the "floor boards" where it fits perfectly. Its not so great if you have anything thats a bit bulky because there is not a lot of height between the floor and aforementioned cover. Either you remove the cover, or if you want to keep things out of sight, remove the floor "boards" to gain some space.

The ARIYA Evolve has all the creature comforts you can think off. The trunk can be opened with a "wave" of your foot if your hands are full, there are blind spot warning indicators, walk away and walk up locking and unlocking (turn on or off in the menus) together with a load of settings to allow you to customise the display or driving style.

ADDED this: ONE-PEDAL driving. It seems a lot of drivers are used to this. The ARIYA does not have the same one-pedal driving that the TESLA or the LEAF have/had. Nissan calls it E-PEDAL ... there is a button for it on the center armrest. If you set it "on" then its only for the duration of the drive. If you want to have it active all the time then you need to set it in the menu (from the drivers screen). Here is the catch, E-PEDAL will not bring the car to a complete standstill, the driver needs to touch the brake to come to a complete stop. AND you need to set the brake-hold setting to "on" (its a button on to the lower left of the steering wheel) if you want the brakes to hold the car in place after its come to a standstill. - otherwise it will "creep". And no there is no setting to turn off "creep" mode. Dont know why. One advantage to having to use the brakes to come to a complete standstill is that the disks will not rust. This was a big issue with my TESLA.

And then there is the onboard software. As much as I love the car, the software seems to be just a bit off. I am a computer guy (a bit older now) so I gave myself sometime to get used to the new way of doing things. I've come across two sorts of issues - works as designed but NOT as desired, and the sort where its just broken. Here are a couple of examples. There is a setting to make getting in and out of the car easier - Im not a big guy so I probably dont need it, but hey - it rolls the drivers seat and steering wheel back to provide easier entry and exit from the drivers side. Turn the car off, open the door and before you step out ARIYA has done its thing. It seems to take things bit to far because if a passenger side occupant opens their door first, ARIYA seems to think the driver is going to get out too and promptly pushes everyhting out of the way - even if the driver has no intention of exiting the car.
Then there are the memory settings for two different drivers (and the same again for front passengers), There is a fabulously comfortable lower back adjustment - the setting of which, for reasons only NISSAN will know, is never committed to memory. Every time you get back into the car, the lower support reset to maximum!
There seem to be issues with bluetooth, an example: if my connected phone is streaming any audio source and I try to use the ARIYA SATNAV .. about five minutes in the SATNAV freezes.

There is more, but I wont bore you. Lets just hope NISSAN is listening and puts its software guys back to work.

Hope my mssiv helps if you are considering the ARIYA.
Thank you for the very insightful feedback and your contribution to this forum. Now that you had driven your Ariya for another 2 months since this last post, has Nissan made any changes since?

Most of us here in the US are just starting to get our Ariya. Mine will be ready on Feb 1. My Ariya was built on Nov '22. I will keep an eye out on these shortcomings and hopefully, Nissan has improved the features with OTA updates. For me, those are tiny issues that wouldnt bother much. Every car has it's quirks.

If you follow Nissan on LinkedIn, perhaps getting your voice heard with your list of things that need improvement will help put a fire for them to make changes. Or, perhaps there is a Nissan Ambassador on this forum reading our posts and taking notes....
 
#8 ·
FWIW, my Ariya doesn't have the lower lumbar support issue, and I've had no satnav (or any other system) freezes, and no one else has reported these issues either. Perhaps they updated those things before the US deliveries started.

If you follow Nissan on LinkedIn, perhaps getting your voice heard with your list of things that need improvement will help put a fire for them to make changes. Or, perhaps there is a Nissan Ambassador on this forum reading our posts and taking notes....
I hope so. There's lots of good feedback here.

By and large, I'm VERY happy with this car and absolutely love driving it. Most of the car's features just work, both as I would expect and as designed. That said, it's not perfect.

A couple complaints:
The front door armrests are ludicrously low - completely unusable. My theory is that Nissan used a standard door design without adjusting it, putting the armrest at the correct height for an ICE car where everything in the cabin is mounted lower. We sit higher up because of the batteries being under us, basically flush with the bottom of the door instead of down in a hole.

I turned off the auto-seat-move-back feature, but not for the reasons stated. I'd rather it move the seat forward immediately after closing the driver's door, but it waits until you've turned the car on. The issue there is that one needs to push the brake pedal when turning the car on and I have trouble reaching the brake pedal with the seat moved back. I'm a pretty small guy (both height and girth), so this feature isn't really necessary anyway. It was just kind of neat.
 
#7 ·
Car Wheel Land vehicle Vehicle Tire


Well... our new baby came early last week.. The first 1000km have been done. I can confirm that the lumber support bug is defo still an an issue... but not "as bad" as I had worried. Apart from that... temps in Denamrk right now are around 0 degrees (centigrade) falling to around -6. Getting around 360 km on a charge (approx 90% to 20%) with winter tires on. The car it's self drives like a dream though I did disable the "drive self/ stay in lane" stuff as I found that if I have to keep touching the steering wheel anyway, I might as well drive (personal choice).

We ordered the "evolve" spec (there are only 2 available in DK, Advance or Evolve. Evolve comes with all the bells and whistles).. The Bose speaker system and HUD are amazing! On a side note, for any future owners, you're going to have to make cleaning the cameras a regular occurance but I assume this is common with all new cars that have "how ever many cameras the car has :)" ...

We went from a 2012 qashqai to a 2022 Ariya, so we don't have a huge amount of experience with these super modern cars... With that said, I have driven my brother in law's Model Y, performance edition and if I were asked to choose... I would choose the Ariya, hands down, every day of the week. Once you get past the "gimiks" of the Telsla (farts, games etc).. it's more important how the car drives and the quality of the build, at least for us.

The software setup and UI on the 2 screens for the Ariya is "fine" (This actually is were Teslas are years ahead, no doubt there).. but what I've found is that once I've set the car up, how we wanted it... all thats left is music and navigation... It might sound boring, I know... but once you start using the car as a daily "driver" to and back from work, the odd outing with the family... all the fun extra stuff that is talked about by the reviewers on YouTube, kind of fade into the background. (Even that secret, James Bond drawer that we have buttons to open and close..).

I'm very happy with it... now we just have to give her a name! :)
 
#10 ·
View attachment 1136

Well... our new baby came early last week.. The first 1000km have been done. I can confirm that the lumber support bug is defo still an an issue... but not "as bad" as I had worried. Apart from that... temps in Denamrk right now are around 0 degrees (centigrade) falling to around -6. Getting around 360 km on a charge (approx 90% to 20%) with winter tires on. The car it's self drives like a dream though I did disable the "drive self/ stay in lane" stuff as I found that if I have to keep touching the steering wheel anyway, I might as well drive (personal choice).

We ordered the "evolve" spec (there are only 2 available in DK, Advance or Evolve. Evolve comes with all the bells and whistles).. The Bose speaker system and HUD are amazing! On a side note, for any future owners, you're going to have to make cleaning the cameras a regular occurance but I assume this is common with all new cars that have "how ever many cameras the car has :)" ...

We went from a 2012 qashqai to a 2022 Ariya, so we don't have a huge amount of experience with these super modern cars... With that said, I have driven my brother in law's Model Y, performance edition and if I were asked to choose... I would choose the Ariya, hands down, every day of the week. Once you get past the "gimiks" of the Telsla (farts, games etc).. it's more important how the car drives and the quality of the build, at least for us.

The software setup and UI on the 2 screens for the Ariya is "fine" (This actually is were Teslas are years ahead, no doubt there).. but what I've found is that once I've set the car up, how we wanted it... all thats left is music and navigation... It might sound boring, I know... but once you start using the car as a daily "driver" to and back from work, the odd outing with the family... all the fun extra stuff that is talked about by the reviewers on YouTube, kind of fade into the background. (Even that secret, James Bond drawer that we have buttons to open and close..).

I'm very happy with it... now we just have to give her a name! :)
Whoa! Two things that struck me from your post:
1). Those are awesome wheels that are not available in the US. We’re jealous!
2). Our Evolve + does not come with Bose audio system. Was that a mfgr upgrade on the Evolve, or standard feature? By any chance your Evolve is AWD? I asked because you said the Evolve spec comes with all the bells and whistles (hence the Bose system and AWD). Our E4orce trim (top of the line) is the only trim that has AWD and a Bose system….

Trust me, I have a couple of friends and a neighbor that own a MY. They regretted their purchases and are looking forward to test driving my Ariya.
 
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