Finally, a Perodua model with ESC. Congratulations to Perodua. May not align with my preference as a first car for my kids, but there should be plenty of Malaysian who will go for it as their first and second car even.

Happy that there will be more safety oriented cars on Malaysian roads.

Floating feel, huh? Just like my avanza

Thanks for sharing. Planning to go for a test drive at perodua bandar baru uda this holidays. Believe the route would be the same as when I tested axia, which is a short drive near angsana, definitely not enough to really test the car.

I test drove an advance a few days ago. Agree on the sluggishness. Somewhat like my iriz cvt 1.6 sluggishness from standstill. When car is already moving, the sluggishness feel is still there. Probably the test drive unit is still very tight.

The car seats is similar to my avanza. Comfortable yet on the slim side. For short drives it is good. But for long drives, based on my experience with my avanza, it may cause some people to have back ache. I started putting all sorts of cushions or beads on my avanza driver seat to reduce the back ache starting from the 2nd year. Its not necessarily long distance driving. Caught is very bad jams in KL of over 3 hours will give me back ache too.

I test drove the persona a few days ago, no vibration on either pedals were felt. My iriz have no vibrations either.

The short distance that I drove the persona does not provide any indication on the solid feel at high speed. However, since it is based on the iriz, just to share, the iriz feels stable at speed exceeding 140km/h. Cornering also feels stable.

Have you tried iriz before. I get the same "pulled back to my seat" feel when I am in a hurry and at the traffic light, being in the front, I pressed until 4000 rpm and maintain it at that rpm, which is the max torque. In my 1.3 cvt, I get this pulled back feel while with my 1.6 cvt, the intensity of the pulled back feel is even more.

Just wondering if you had driven as Iriz before to compare the feel. In my test drive of the bezza advance, I did not get this feel since the test unit's engine is probably still very tight.

For my usage, where typically I drive with my kids, we fill up each car with 4 to 5 occupants. Thus the total passengers weight is about 300kg to 400kg. Luggage is bettween 0 to 100kg++. At such additional weight, the power to weight ratio between a bezza carrying my family vs a new persona carrying my family becomes is very similar. No advantage to bezza here.

For the power to weight ratio (HP per tonne, from Paul Tan's):
Bezza: 101 derived from 94 HP / 0.93 tonne
Persona: 88 derived from 107 HP / 1.21 tonne
a difference of about 12.9%, advantage Bezza

This is for a car without any passengers / driver / luggage. For real life, a car will carry a driver and 0 or more passengers and 0 or more luggage. Its this power to weight ratio that I am talking about. A typical scenario would be for me to bring my boys for jumaat prayers. The four of us would weight about 390kg. In this scenario, the real life and actual power to weight ratio would be:
Bezza: 71.2 derived from 94 HP / 1.32 tonne
Persona: 66.8 derived from 107 HP / 1.6 tonne
a difference of about 6.2%, still advantage Bezza but difference is reduced by half.

Theoretically, though I'm not a mathematician, you can fairly easily calculate the approximate additional weight of when the power to weight ratio of both cars is the same. But let me not bore you with such details. My point is that using the power to weight ratio as a selling point for Bezza may not entirely be an accurate point. A literally big family will find the power to weight ratio to not be that much when comparing Bezza to a persona.

Btw, I am no proton fanboy. I am in the market to buy the best value for money car as a 1st car for my children. My eldest son got his last year. Now with new models coming out, eyeing one for my 2nd son. Bezza advance is one of the candidate car for purchase. iriz and persona being the other 2 candidates.

Very true. My 10 years old avanza is still giving me approximately 15km/L in city driving. Through experience a driver will know what style of driving will save fuel and what won't.