Apart from doing a few miles each day for work we haven’t really done much driving in out new Toyota BZ4X EV but instead have spent a few minutes here and there checking out some of the features.
The car has all the standard bits you would expect, air con etc but we went for the top Vision trim front wheel drive and we wanted to play.
It comes with an automatic boot, ie kick your leg under the rear to open the hatch, well that turns out you virtually have to bang your shin against the rear bumper in the right spot for it to open, can’t see us using that too often on a shopping trip as our shins are going to be black and blue. The car not only has heated steering wheel and front seats it also has ventilated front seats which apparently cool the seat in hot weather. Being as it’s only March and we are in the UK we have not got around to testing this out yet.
One thing that has really bugged me over the last couple of days is the multimedia system. It has the option to create driver profiles. So when driver a gets in, it turns the radio to their selected station etc, when driver b gets in the radio station is set to their favourite. As there are two of us that will regularly be driving the car this sounds great. Setting up the driver profile you can add their phone to their profile as the prefered bluetooth device as well as a key fob. As for some strange reason Toyota only sends out one key fob with the car and then a second is apparently sent out a few weeks later we didn’t think we would add the key fob to the driver profiles just yet, assuming the system would detect which phone is connected to decide which driver is in the vehicle.
OK so my details had already been added by the dealersip, so we wanted to add my wife as a seperate driver profile. well that isn’t as easy as you would think. First of all do a quick google and toyota.com states the ‘owner’ as to ‘add a driver’ from within the Toyota app on their phone and that then invites that person to install the app on their phone, well it turns out that is not the case in the UK. You can’t add a 2nd driver that way, although both the dealers and toyota UK social media team thought there must be a a way.
We then decided to install the app manually on my wifes phone and create her her own my toyota account. Simple, now get in the car and set up her profile. worked fine. However next time one of use got in the car we had to agree to terms and conditions and then we was logged in as ‘Guest’, we then had to scan a qr code from the app on our phone to log in as the driver profile. Sorry but this is going to be a right pain in the back side every time.
I also noticed that if my wife drives the car and parks up, if I then check the ‘find my car’ in the My Toyota app, it doesn’t find it. Not helpful at all.
So as a last resort we added the one key fob we currently have to my profile, hey that worked, i can get in and out of the car without logging in everytime. So at the moment having two profiles is pointless as we have just the one fob and to the wife’s annoyance, when she is driving she has to be logged in as me. It’s a minor thing but one that does niggle.
Once the 2nd fob arrives we will register it against the wifes driver profile and see if everything works as you would expect but to be honest I am not holding my breath, it just doesn’t feel like it will work for some reason.
Apart from that, we are happy with the car so far, tonight we will be charging it to 100% as we are going on a long journey tomorrow.
