Bazzert congratulations on getting your new toy and thank you for the pictures and answers.
As this car comes with so many new systems to learn does it come with a 4 volume handbook or is it all on the centre screen. How was the hand over, did the salesman spend 3 semesters lecturing on how to operate the seats. letters not necessarily in the right order

No handbook - just a quick start guide and reference to online!

Im sure you will enjoy immensely MJG

One of the small improvements I noticed on the test drive, the bonnet release is on the same side as the driver! No big deal, but irks me every time I have to walk around my current car. What other excuse do I need for a new model! Filters are in fact so good that in certain circumstances, when the ambient air is already polluted, a diesel car will tend to extract more particles from the air than it emits. Emissions Analytics worked with........etc etc

He who dies with the most toys wins...

Dixy - The handover was very short, ie lets have the keys and leave (My choice) I enjoy exploring all the bells and whistles myself, I have a good technical head so to be honest its all fairly straight for forward, as I said the Pivi Pro is very intuitive, most other controls such as seat are very similar to my outgoing sport.

Hoyboy - The door bins look and feel like leather, the seat backs are hard plastic.

Seat backs are hard plastic in an AB????

The seat backs and pockets in my 405 were leather!

Little by little we are starting to see the cost cuts mounting up:

Seat backs
Sun visors
Grab handles.
Parcel shelf.

Do you think it has it in the SV model? I'm trying to work out what the actual differences are between the Autobiography and SV which makes it around £30k more when specced with the same engine.

Seems to be more plush back seats with hot stone massage front seats compared to normal massage front seats in the AB are the main differences. Along with more choice of veneers. Even so that's a £3,200 option on the AB so what's the extra £26k going towards?

Excellent question Hoyboy - I think the short answer is profit. Which I don’t begrudge them by the way - I want the firm to do well.

As a previous SV AB owner I went to the small car show in Chelsea a few months back to see the new SV. They only had the
LWB on display. The differences are the seats as you noted, some interior details like the ceramic bits, which I didn’t like, some additional exterior colour and wheel options, some exterior trim and some additional interior colour combinations. Most of those things cost extra so this is a very different proposal to the previous SV AB which was a power hike and an ‘if we make it you can have it in the price’ approach.

For me the value proposition in the new SV doesn’t stack up. Which is a shame because if they had created something similar to the last SV I would probably have gone for it.