Internet radio in the UK

£2100 just for DAB is a lot of money, but that's what you currently need to do if you want it.

That said, the UHF sound system is obviously much better than the standard, in my opinion.

Anything you can play on your iphone/android phone you can send to the car via bluetooth. The quality is not exceptional, but fine.

The car has built in internet radio streaming covering every station you could ever possibly want to listen to, however there's a current issue that the Telefonica supplied 3G SIM cards think that they're homed in Spain, so the BBC streams of domestic radio stations don't work because of geogrpahical licensing issues. This is bound to get resolved soon enough though.

IMO, DAB is a good but doomed technology as internet radio and streaming provide a far wider choice of music to listen too. I have taken the UHF upgrade, but I wouldn't generally think that DAB or Steaming are going to be the best answer on the platform, rather a USB FLAC library for when I want the highest quality sound and to be totally honest, as with all cars road noise really means that you can't be to precious about audio quality anyway.

On a side note, UHF along with a number of options are overpriced. For example, I didn't go for the roof liner (I went pano and didn't see how lining should be the same cost with less to cover), extended leather but I did take leather seats. I kind if wish i didn't take the seats and should have considered re-finishing the interior and a premium stereo after pickup.

EchoVictor said:

Ihow are you owners finding the signal strength of the cars 3G?

Click to expand...

Extremely bad if you leave the big cities. The car is on the O2 network, which has pretty good notional coverage, _but_ a large amount of the coverage in rural areas is 2G not 3G (and that 2G is often vanilla GPRS rather than the faster EDGE). The car doesn't appear to make any adaptation to the slow connection, to the extent that it continues to show '3G' on the display where any other phone you carry to the same location will be showing 2G, and the connected features can become unusable even though there is apparently reasonable signal strength shown.

My experience is mainly in East Anglia - other places may be different.

The options are definitely priced to maximise profit (as is the whole car; this is what's funding Model III ultimately). If you don't really want something you definitely shouldn't get it - 90% of the joy is from what happens when you press the go pedal and none of the options really have any impact on that!

Having driven a car with a very basic spec for 24h I'm happy that I chose the UHF sound and the ambient lighting (and even the yacht floor adds a premium feel to the cabin that I missed in the loan car), but the benefits of the extended leather and cold weather pack are really very marginal indeed. Rear seat heaters that can only be controlled from the front centre console really aren't that useful at all.

I am loving the Internet radio in my non UHF car. I don't bother with my own MP3s anymore.

The RDIO Channel system works so well. Just start off the journey listening to a particular song you fancy, and the subsequent songs that play are generally very well matched. I am discovering lots of new songs I really like that I've never heard before.

My day to day journey into Nottingham is fine in terms of coverage. I had maybe 5 minutes of non coverage driving down the A1 south of Grantham towards the A14, but for me trips like that are few and far between.