Additional mileage-based musings

 Yesterday I ran down to Indy for Madeline's final lacrosse game of the season.  I think the C4S returned pretty good mileage on the trip:

26.3 mpg?

As I typically do when I go down to Indy for a late game, I stopped by Fresh Indian Grill for some paneer:

Mmmm, paneer

I had such a nice car chat with Navi, the son of the owner of the Fresh Indian Grill.  He's studying aeronautical engineering at Purdue, and is a car nut.  His dream is a Nissan GT-R, and I hope he makes it happen!

It poured rain the entire way down, and the C4S just trundled along, no problem at all:

Not slippery when wet

After Madeline and I merged onto 31 and settled in for the drive home, we happened to notice that we were right on time:

I love it when this happens!

Now that I have a few more miles and my first night drive in the car, I have a few more random thoughts to get out.

CarPlay

First off, the CarPlay adaptor works...mostly.  When I start the car, everything connects as intended.  If I use the speech button on the end of the turn signal stalk, the Siri voice is a little garbled.  However, if I tap the center screen, touch a name, and dictate a message, the interaction with Siri is smooth.  Spotify is flawless, works great.  So does the navigation.  No noticeable lag.

One odd thing happened when I stopped for gas.  I gassed up the car, got back in, and the CarPlay was visually working, but the sound was all coming through the phone.  Bizarre.  Whatever, it works well enough for now.  I'll continue to experiment and report.

For a long trip, I just plug my phone in.  The connection thus far is more reliable, but the wireless adaptor works well enough for running around on shorter errands.

Interior

Thinking a bit more about the seats, the single-foot hand-on-the-sill method really helps me climb over the side bolsters.  I don't like bolsters that look smashed and destroyed, so I'm pretty careful to climb over before settling into the seat.

The other thing that's striking is the amount of space in the rear seat area.  The rear seats themselves have much more headroom than the 964, but what's really impressive is the little space behind the rear seats, where you can easily stuff additional soft bags.  With the rear seats down, the space back there is pretty expansive for a relatively small car:

More rear seat space than in the 964

The cabin is a really lovely place to be at night.  The windshield is reasonably close, and there is glass pretty much everywhere you look.  The frameless side windows are large, and the glass roof combines to give you a sense of sitting in a fishbowl.  There is soft, dimmable lighting in the footwells, around the door handles and door storage pockets, a halo light on the roof above the rearview mirror, and rear seat lighting.  I kind of gives airplane-at-night vibes. 

Soft lighting in the door

Soft lighting for the rear seats

I like to adjust dash lighting at night, depending on how dark it is out side.  Driving through a city with lots of streetlights?  I like brighter gauges.  Out in the middle of nowhere, like the road from Indy to South Bend, it's much darker.  Using "city mode" would be much too bright and ruin my night vision.  Porsche makes it super easy to adjust the amount of light in the gauge cluster.  All you need to do is rotate the trip meter reset button, left for darker, right for brighter.  Even better, it uniformly adjusts the brightness of the center screen in unison with the gauges!  Thank you!  Please, every car should be like that.

You can adjust the brightness in one degree increments, so there are essentially 100 brightness levels, so it's really easy to tune.  Curiously, I set the illumination to 0%, which didn't actually turn off the dash lights.  It was a good, soft, low light, and the gauges were perfectly legible.

Granular brightness control affects gauges and center screen

Another nice touch - both the interior rear view mirror and exterior wing mirrors darken automatically when headlights approach from behind.  It's very easy on the eyes, and avoids the dimmed rear view/blinding side view effect in all our other vehicles.

The cabin is noticeably more spacious than the 964.  Madeline was pretty tired after her game, it was late, and she had a belly full of warm paneer, so it was unsurprising that she ended up sacking out.  Moving the passenger seat all the way back gave her lots of legroom, and then she reclined the seat.  From the driver's seat, it looked like a great place to get some rest!

I remember sleeping in the 964 on the way back from Milwaukee in the middle of the night, and though I got a cat nap, it wasn't exactly spacious.  The C4S has mcuh more space, and you feel it.

Not exactly an Easter egg, but I really like how the doorsill looks at night.  It's just a little reminder of what awaits as your companion for some nighttime escapades:

The headlights are excellent, I appreciate how they swivel into turns and throw lows of light down the road.  Madeline and I were talking about the car in general, and I kept coming back to how impressed I remain with its breadth.  It's as comfortable bombing around a back road as it is slogging along through a rain storm or following rabbits at night.  So many little driving-related details were engineered into the car, it has great grip, and there's sufficient power available at any speed.

The exploration continues!