We've just spent a week in north west Sardinia and whilst there took to the road for a couple of days to see more than the four walls of an all inclusive hotel.
In short what a great place for a car based touring holiday. Roads were very quiet at this time of year. well surfaced and for Italy not badly signposted, although there are sign posts in very bad poaitions! We did about 300 miles over the couple of days, doing one day to the west coast town of Bosa and a second trip east to the mountains ascending to almost 5,000 ft.
The island has a decent network of dual carriageway auto strada with 80mph limit, but we found the surface on some sections to be so bad to be dangerous, large areas of top surface missing, large potholes and ruts, so doing 80 was for the brave! Outside if these there are good A roads with 90kmh limit. Whilst they are good at showing lower limits, 50kmh is common around junctions, the end of the lower limits tend to not be signposted so you need to make an educated guess! Direction signs can suddenly disappear so satnav, or a good sense of direction are recommended, we had the latter!
Police are hot on bad driving and speeding and we saw plenty of patrols, driving everything from the usual Fiats and Lancias to BMWs and even a couple of Subaru Foresters. Speaking to the hire company rep when I took the car back he said in August traffic police from mainland Italy are sent to Sardinia to increase patrols dramatically and pull Italian holiday makers who have no regard for any aspect of road safety. The varied Sardinian roads offer great opportunities to set free the boyracer, in many ways it reminded me of Scotland, varied roads with little traffic.
Diesel was about €1.50 a litre with petrol slightly higher. Lots of fuel stations are unmanned so you feed cash into what looks like a cash machine, select which pump you are parked at, select the fuel you want, then go and fill up. This involved me moving the car as the pump number wasn't obvious!
The car was an i30 diesel estate with 2500 km on the clock. Great when it was doing the longer A road and autostrada sections, but the severe lack of anything from the engine at less than 1800 rpm made for a very frustrating driving experience on the more involved sections of road. Lots of nothing, a huge limp of boost, change gear, but then revs drop to about 2,000 rpm, a slight drop in speed and you are back to 1700 rpm and needing the lower gear again to gain speed. On not too demanding mountain bends it needed 1st or it would just die, you then get to second to be at the next bend needing to drop into 1st to get round it. The gearchange indicator was also hopelesly optimitistic, suggesting 6th gear from 50 mph. Change at this and the engine would be labouring badly at about 1400 rpm and offering nothing, overtaking was also interesting. 4th always felt too high, but 3rd had it out of poke before completing the manouver. It appears a six speed box is one too many. A five speed would make for a much better drive.
Just like our i20 the biggest fault with the i30 were the seats which offered very little lumbar support,even though it was supposedly adjustable.
The car was indicating 6l per 100km for the whole hire period which is 47 mpg.
If you fancy a road trip the island is definately recommended, over 2-3 weeks you could have an excellent holiday, but try and do it in an Aston V12 and not an i30 diesel and outside of July and August when the Italians pay a visit!
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Sounds like fun. And the driving characteristics seem identical to the Fiat 500L Diesel we had last summer in northern Italy. What happened to nice free revving engines.....
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I drove a new renault scenic with the 1.5 dci engine, similar characteristics, nothing below 2000 rpm. I found it smooth and fairly economical but terrible at rounabouts and junctions. I couldn't live with one and couldn't wait to get my petrol engine back.
Are all small diesels as bad?
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