Yeah, I'm the guy who wrote the posts about the whole decision process that led to choosing the Envision. Well, after owning the Envision for a month we found we'd missed a few things in making the decision. These were sufficuently bothersome that we chose to get rid of it even though doing so would be financially ugly.
On the test drive, we had read the reviews complaining about upper cabin ventilation, and we did evaluate it. It wasn't ideal, but we thought we could live with it. But after a while, and driving on hotter days, we found it to be an issue. Especially since the Envision turned out to be relatively poor at maintaining a consistent temperature and fan speed. Even when the fan speed was manually selected, it sped up and slowed down even when not doing so as part of the engine stop/start. Dealer said they couldn't do anything about this.
My wife likes to listen to albums, so we have a group of usb sticks containing them. And the audio system programmers (who probably only listen to sirius and pandora) made it impossible to play a whole usb stick album-after-album. There's no way to select "all albums" and once an album is selected there's no way to override the hard-coded repeat of that album until you intervene. Dealer said that's just how it works.
Since we moved to Florida, every car we owned has gotten the windshield tinted with 3M Crystalline 90 to block heat. And in no other car has this been an issue. In the Envision, this confused the solar sensor so much that almost any shade would cause the car to turn on its lights and switch the displays to night mode. And night mode is so dim at it brightest that it's impossible to see except in the dead of night. Dealer said the solar sensitivity could not be adjusted. So the car goes into night mode when driving under an overpass, under an overhanging tree, and even when the sensor is shaded by the car's roof.
Those three items were the big hits, and were the main basis for the decision. But, here's a selection of other things we hadn't looked at during our car selection process which we also found annoying:
We'd test driven the Premium I. Our Premium II had the surround camera system, which was terrible. It put a surround picture on the left side of the screen, shrinking the backup camera view. And that image was terrible. Dealer compared it to another Envision and said that's normal.
Toll roads are ubiquitous in central Florida, but we didn't happen to include one in our test drive. Who would think it necessary? Well, every time our Envision approached a toll booth (or even went near one on a parallel road), it loudly spoke "Caution! Toll Booth?". Yes, with a rising inflection as if it wasn't sure why it was doing this. Dealer said they didn't know why it did this or how to make it stop.
This is a $49k msrp vehicle. All 4 windows have express-down, which we'd expect in this class of car. Yet only the driver's window has express-up. Also, we missed the driver's seat umbrella holder we had in the MKC. Missed it enough that I actually made one.
Replacement plan 1 was a Land Rover Discovery Sport. Turned out that JLR hasn't decided to let US models have adaptive cruise control yet. We were pretty bummed out at that point, with our next two choices being the NX and GLC, neither of which have cooled seats. At some point my wife said "If it wasn't for the issues with park assist I'd want my MKC back." I was researching whether or not I could unplug the sensors when I somehow discovered that a Ford Edge and Lincoln MKC, with the full park assist system, have a button that with one push turns off the park assist. So, we now have a fully loaded Ford Edge.
And by the way, for $5k lower msrp than the Envision, the passenger window has express-up and both front seats have umbrella holders.
