Thanks to some advice from a BYD Owner’s group on Facebook, I was able to find the user manual that belongs to the ATTO 3 and download it. Lots of valuable info there in and lots not so valuable, but the reading I did this morning demanded that we go out for a drive to try some things out.
The first thing I needed to know was how to make the cruise control work. On the drive home from Brisbane, we didn’t have time to work out how it functioned so we used the right foot to try to keep the vehicle at a constant 100kph. And that was not easy because it constantly snuck over the 100 mark.
At this point I not too interested in the ACC because there are not many cars on the road out here to which we need to attach ourselves to make it useful. Once I read the relevant section in the manual the cruise control was all very logical. I was then keen to set the cruise control to 100 and drive our main road out of town for about 10K and see how it compared handling wise with the 2015 Ford Territory, our previous vehicle. I am no driving expert but it sure felt that the ATTO 3 handled the curves more comfortably than the Territory does. I didn’t see or feel any need to change the tyres as a number of the motor reviewers suggested.
I had hoped to hang my action camera from the glass above seats, It stayed up there for a few minutes and then fell to the floor. I guess I didn’t make sure the suction cup was well enough sealed. As a result I don’t have video from that camera of the trip. I didn’t mind all that much because we were able to close the blind and keep the sun out. I am not much fussed about the sun roof. I wish they had left it out and included some other tech in its place. Memory for the drivers seat position would have been much more useful.
I did however put an SD card in the slot which allowed the onboard camera to do it thing. That camera produces great images for the infotainment screen but the quality of the images recorded leaves a little to be desired.
I thought the cruise control did its job well. I set the REGEN to the highest level and the mode to ECO for this short trip and it all worked really well. With the cruise control set at 100, the REGEN did a great job keeping it at 100 when going down hills. The road noise is a little more than I expected but that may be because I don’t actually hear the road noise above the engine noise in the Territory. In spite of that it is still very quiet and comfortable.
The car came with an 8GB micro SD card installed and the camera had recorded five minute blocks of video from the last section of our trip home from Brisbane. I removed that card and put a 64GB card in its place. It seems that the system formats the card and creates a number of folders apparently for the storage of files to be played on the screen.
Folders include Alarms, Android, DCIM, Download, Movies, Music, Notifications, Pictures, Podcasts, Recorder and Ringtones. The recorded movies are recorded as MP4 files in a folder called Normal which is in the Recorder Folder. JPEG photos were stored in the Picture folder and locked video, that is video that won’t be deleted, is stored in the Event folder.
The worst thing about the car that I have found so far is the positioning of the SD card slot. It is very uncomfortable for us old folk to get to, but I guess in the future we won’t need to get to it very often. So I don’t have much to complain about. Before replacing the SD in the car, I uploaded a couple of YouTube videos I had created to the card to check out if we could play movies etc from the SD card. It turned out that the infotainment system played a couple of types of movies no problem. And the audio was quite good as well.
On the way home, we decided to stop at the Big Orange to purchase some oranges, as you do in Gayndah. It is well past the “good” orange season here, so I hope these are as sweet as they look.
