As good as our Laguna coupe looks on the outside, and as good as the interior material quality is, it doesn’t take much to alter the opinion of a car.
All the designers’ good work has, to some extent, been undone in one fell swoop. Anyone looking for a few minutes’ entertainment should sit a colleague in a Laguna and ask them to change the stereo from FM to medium wave.
It’s broadly true that Renault doesn’t install the most user-friendly stereos (see the Megane for more details), but chief biscuit-nabber is the Laguna.
Editor Young, lover of Five Live’s afternoon show, was the first to complain, and to be honest I thought the boss was just being a techno-numpty as, under normal circumstances, especially in the football close season, I hop between London’s FM stations and hadn’t ventured out to medium wave. So I marched out to smugly teach him how simple it was, having worked out the correct sequence of buttons in a Megane we recently had in for a test drive.
But no, the Laguna is equally complicated, but in a different way. As far as I can work out, and I’m not even pretending I’ve got it sussed, it takes three presses of different buttons to switch bands, whereas all other car makers makes do with one.
I know it’s the sort of irritation that fades with both time and familiarity with the system, but a stereo should be a simple tool that can be operated with minimum distraction.
The Laguna’s still pretty, appearing to be well-built and returning a decent fuel economy, but the little details are sometimes as important as the big ones.
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