pshotton
Standard Member
I've just dropped our hire car, a Seres 3, back at Europcar after an 8 day holiday in the alps, and thought I'd share my thoughts while they're still fresh.
Seres is a Chinese/American brand. The parent company, Sokon, is a major Chinese battery maker and auto tech company. Seres also have a design and production facility in California (I think) in an old Hummer factory.
We always try to hire electric, last visit we had a VW ID3 which was very nice, very good range, more upmarket than our home MG ZS EV but the MG outshone it on a few features, particularly ergonomically.
The Seres 3 is on paper a very similar fish to the MG. Chinese, hatchback, similar range from a slightly larger battery. There the similarity ends. The Seres 3 can be summed up in one word - sh*t. It is one of the most unrefined vehicles I've ever driven (and in my past I owned a Lada Niva 4x4). The worst combination of Chinese ergonomics and American lack of finesse. The throttle control is awful, driving at constant speed you're lurching from acceleration to regenerative braking continuously - tiring for the driver and unpleasant for passengers. Acceleration is poor, braking is lacking in progression, the steering is completely wooden, and overall it feels large, ungainly, heavy, cumbersome and unrefined.
Reversing gently into a tight downhill drive it keeps braking the car to a stop, at which point the auto-hold comes on and requires a significant press of the accelerator to override, at which point the car leaps backwards - very alarming. Driving out of the drive the handbrake would not release without either a) almost full throttle, or b) manually releasing the handbrake with the car immediately rolling back. Everything felt clunky and rough.
The cruise control is not adaptive and resume oftenb doesn't work so on a busy road you luch from the set speed to much slower the moment you touch the brake and it takes ages to recover set speed.
The regenerative braking is feeble. Driving a long descent from the high mountain we were getting max 10% regeneration and had to keep applying the brake. Our ZS would have more like 20% and hold the car without touching the brake. This difference also showed up in the range figures; going up the mountain the range was dropping alarmingly fast, but back downhill it didn't pick up the difference and although the range dropped slowly it didn't increase like the ZS manages.
We had a very 'range-anxious' drive back from the alps to catch our train in Lyon. Despite more than 14 hours on the granny charger (both car and charger said charging) we faced our journey the next morning with a stated range of 90km! The nearest fast charger was roughly 25km away and mainly downhill, but we arrived with 25km range left and the last 10km had been in tortoise mode. I've never come across this but in the Seres with less than about 60km of range it shuts down the power so that uphill it maxes out at about 30km/h and reaches 45 km/h on the flat. After 30 minutes on a fast charger it only had 65km, so we went to another about 12km away and managed to get up to 260km after about 40 minutes. We arrived at the car hire place (about 120km away) with less than 50 km (driving at between 90 and 110 km/h) and in tortoise mode again driving into the car park. We missed our train (having given ourselves 4h to make a 1h30 journey) so missed our ferry.
Dropping it at Europcar I told the pickup guy it was an awful car. 'Oui' he said. 'C'est merde'. Absolutely.
At pick-up we'd been offered an upgrade to a Tesla - for another 35 euros/day, which would have doubled our hire cost. With hindsight I should have bitten his hand off. What should have been a relaxing holiday turned into a high-stress experience because of the awfullness of this car.
Moral of this story. If you're ever offered, or think of buying, a Seres 3, run away, fast.
Seres is a Chinese/American brand. The parent company, Sokon, is a major Chinese battery maker and auto tech company. Seres also have a design and production facility in California (I think) in an old Hummer factory.
We always try to hire electric, last visit we had a VW ID3 which was very nice, very good range, more upmarket than our home MG ZS EV but the MG outshone it on a few features, particularly ergonomically.
The Seres 3 is on paper a very similar fish to the MG. Chinese, hatchback, similar range from a slightly larger battery. There the similarity ends. The Seres 3 can be summed up in one word - sh*t. It is one of the most unrefined vehicles I've ever driven (and in my past I owned a Lada Niva 4x4). The worst combination of Chinese ergonomics and American lack of finesse. The throttle control is awful, driving at constant speed you're lurching from acceleration to regenerative braking continuously - tiring for the driver and unpleasant for passengers. Acceleration is poor, braking is lacking in progression, the steering is completely wooden, and overall it feels large, ungainly, heavy, cumbersome and unrefined.
Reversing gently into a tight downhill drive it keeps braking the car to a stop, at which point the auto-hold comes on and requires a significant press of the accelerator to override, at which point the car leaps backwards - very alarming. Driving out of the drive the handbrake would not release without either a) almost full throttle, or b) manually releasing the handbrake with the car immediately rolling back. Everything felt clunky and rough.
The cruise control is not adaptive and resume oftenb doesn't work so on a busy road you luch from the set speed to much slower the moment you touch the brake and it takes ages to recover set speed.
The regenerative braking is feeble. Driving a long descent from the high mountain we were getting max 10% regeneration and had to keep applying the brake. Our ZS would have more like 20% and hold the car without touching the brake. This difference also showed up in the range figures; going up the mountain the range was dropping alarmingly fast, but back downhill it didn't pick up the difference and although the range dropped slowly it didn't increase like the ZS manages.
We had a very 'range-anxious' drive back from the alps to catch our train in Lyon. Despite more than 14 hours on the granny charger (both car and charger said charging) we faced our journey the next morning with a stated range of 90km! The nearest fast charger was roughly 25km away and mainly downhill, but we arrived with 25km range left and the last 10km had been in tortoise mode. I've never come across this but in the Seres with less than about 60km of range it shuts down the power so that uphill it maxes out at about 30km/h and reaches 45 km/h on the flat. After 30 minutes on a fast charger it only had 65km, so we went to another about 12km away and managed to get up to 260km after about 40 minutes. We arrived at the car hire place (about 120km away) with less than 50 km (driving at between 90 and 110 km/h) and in tortoise mode again driving into the car park. We missed our train (having given ourselves 4h to make a 1h30 journey) so missed our ferry.
Dropping it at Europcar I told the pickup guy it was an awful car. 'Oui' he said. 'C'est merde'. Absolutely.
At pick-up we'd been offered an upgrade to a Tesla - for another 35 euros/day, which would have doubled our hire cost. With hindsight I should have bitten his hand off. What should have been a relaxing holiday turned into a high-stress experience because of the awfullness of this car.
Moral of this story. If you're ever offered, or think of buying, a Seres 3, run away, fast.
