Avita 11: Driving Experience

Author: Xiao Dong

Editor: Chris

From the day the Avita brand was born, it has attracted a great deal of attention. Together with Changan Automobile, Huawei, and CATL, Avita has created a brand new intelligent electric vehicle technology platform – CHN.

As the first model on the CHN platform, Avita 11 brings together the best of the three members involved. On August 8th, Avita 11 was officially launched. Recently, the “Avita Driving Bootcamp” national user experience activity has officially started, and the first stop is in Shanghai. So, how does the Avita 11 perform when driving?

Track Test Drive: Impressive Chassis Feeling

This test drive is divided into two parts: track test drive and city road test drive. First, let’s talk about the track test drive, which includes 100-kilometer acceleration, deceleration, continuous deceleration belt, S-bend, slope and cross-axle test. The track is not big, and the full potential of the car has not been explored.

With the mode switched to Sport, let’s start!

All Avita 11 models are equipped with the Huawei DriveONE dual-motor four-wheel drive system, with a maximum output power of 425 kW and a maximum torque of 650 N·m, and a 0-100 km/h acceleration time of 3.98 seconds. In Sport mode, the throttle response is very fast, and there is no delay in acceleration. It is worth noting that Avita 11 does not cause strong dizziness during acceleration.

With the support of Michelin PC6 tires and four-piston Brembo calipers, the nearly 2.3-ton Avita 11 has sufficient braking power, with an official announced braking distance of less than 35 meters, and during my test, the stopping distance at 80-90 km/h is less than 30 meters. There is a big difference in low-speed braking between Comfort mode and Sport mode. In Sport mode, tapping the brake lightly will bring the car to an immediate stop, while in Comfort mode, the braking feels more elegant.

Now, let’s turn to the deceleration belt.During the first lap when the coach was familiarizing me with the route, I didn’t even feel the 10 speed bumps in a row. Maybe I was too concentrated on communicating with the coach. It was not until I was driving by myself that I realized there were these 10 speed bumps. The combination of front double-wishbone and rear five-link suspension system, along with Changan’s tuning, provided excellent shock-absorbing performance that surprised me. The sense of solidity and stability of the entire chassis was further demonstrated in the subsequent city road test.

Facing the challenges of slopes and intersections, the AVITA 11 conquered them with ease. In the intersection project, the AVITA 11 easily passed, with the driver lightly pressing the throttle and the vehicle’s ESP and torque distribution automatically taking care of the rest. This is a significant difference from my experience with the Ideal L9 in Beijing, which has a larger weight and is more affected by different road surfaces (L9 is on gravel roads).

Next comes an S-curve. Due to the restrictions of the venue, the entry speed was not fast, so the sense of lateral support was not evident. However, when standing outside the venue and watching the AVITA 11 go through the turn, the car’s overall posture was good. As for the steering feel, even in the sports mode, the steering feel was not heavy, and there was no deliberate creation of a “sporty feel for heaviness.” However, it does provide a certain level of quality steering feel.

The overall calibration of the AVITA 11 tends more towards comfort, and the chassis quality adds bonus points. I highly recommend everyone to experience it for themselves in the driving camp event.

City Road: Impressive Noise Control

As night fell, as the last group experiencing the city road, I felt both fortunate and disappointed. The originally planned route was met with the 18:00 Shanghai rush hour, and the result was just one word- jams. So, as the last group, guided by the coach, we completed this city road test through endless right turns.When I first started driving, I even forgot that it was an electric car. The regenerative braking of the Avita 11 is not very noticeable. Even when it is adjusted to the strongest level, the whole vehicle does not have a significant drag sensation, which is very friendly for users who switch from fuel-powered cars. However, this raises a question for me, whether it will have a certain impact on energy consumption, as strong regenerative braking is still quite effective in improving the vehicle’s range.

In the leisurely comfort mode, the feedback of the accelerator pedal becomes less responsive in the early stage, but when you deep press the accelerator during overtaking, it will still let you know that this is a car with a 0-100km/h acceleration time of 4 seconds. The brake pedal still has the familiar feeling that I like, and it can give the driver enough confidence in the early stage. On the relatively short city roads, where hitting the manhole cover becomes my default move, the chassis feedback gives me a solid feel with the necessary toughness.

It is worth mentioning that the Avita 11 has made a clever design on the A-pillar to minimize the driver’s blind spots, as you can feel from the image below.

Fortunately, I didn’t encounter any traffic congestion, and the journey was very smooth all the way. However, the short ride in the car left me wanting more.

To be honest, although the 22-inch large wheels add a lot of points to the appearance, I’m a little worried about the control of road noise. But after driving the Avita 11 on the road, I found that the NVH control was really great, even without using double-layer laminated glass.

On the one hand, the Avita 11 has good NVH control on its own, and on the other hand, there is also the Avita’s self-developed RNC active road noise reduction technology (Road Noise Cancellation) that provides additional support.

Let’s talk about RNC in detail. Having RNC on is not like turning on noise-cancelling earphones where the world suddenly becomes quiet. The difficulty of controlling road noise is much more complex than noise-cancelling earphones. For RNC, the vibration caused by “tire-road contact” is what needs to be reduced, while wind noise and motor whine cannot be cancelled out. Therefore, the source of road noise is vibration, not the noise inside the car, so RNC does not affect listening to music.

So how does RNC work?

Simply put, by placing vibration sensors at specific locations such as the chassis and collecting road noise data information through in-car microphones, then calculating the anti-noise sound waves through independent amplifier DSP chips using self-developed algorithms, real-time anti-noise sound waves are emitted from the car’s speakers to actively reduce the road noise inside the vehicle.

It looks easy, but Dr. Kong Xiangjie, the head of RNC technology, said that they encountered many difficulties during the development process.

Firstly, complete randomness is one of the challenges that road vehicles face. To achieve a Real-time Noise Control (RNC) effect, the vehicle needs to respond immediately to non-smooth roads such as potholes, damage, and speed bumps. In addition, the problem of a three-dimensional space in the cabin and the broad frequency of road noise also needs to be addressed.

Secondly, real-time performance is crucial in RNC technology. The reverse noise generation needs to be created before the vibration propagates from the road surface to the car’s interior. The generated reverse noise needs to be sent out through the speaker with a certain delay. Therefore, a low-latency forward system is required to deliver the road noise to the ear before generating the counter-noise signal and passing it to the speaker.

Finally, complex transmission is another challenge as there are multiple sources of road noise. It is necessary to carefully consider the correlation between the vibration transmission between different wheels, which requires extensive calculations and experiments.

RNC has always been enabled by default on Avita 11, and it cannot be directly perceived without being turned off manually. Hence, it is stronger when encountering stronger noise. The optimized position for the RNC experience on Avita 11 is on the left rear seat, where the noise control in the car is relatively poor.

Ultimately, the RNC technology can reduce the total sound pressure level by 3 dB(A), and the peak sound pressure level can be reduced by up to 13 dB(A).

After achieving a quiet cabin, it is crucial to have a good sound system. Avita did not choose an OEM partner but opted to calibrate its own 14 speakers + 1 external 12-channel amplifier to bring a surround sound field, which sounded excellent to me. On the way back, I intentionally played the same song, and the difference was quite noticeable when compared to the car model loaded with 12-speaker BOSE sound.

In addition, for low-bitrate audio files, such as MP3, Avita 11 uses ASR low-bitrate compressed audio compensation technology to restore the original sound quality of music.

The excellent NVH performance combined with a decent sound system made my short test drive on city roads incredibly pleasant.

ConclusionAfter the test drive, the chassis surprised me and occupied most of my emotions. After carefully recalling the shortcomings I saw in my brief encounter with the Avita 11, I found out that the car’s underlying system uses Huawei’s HarmonyOS and the UI is designed by Avita’s design team. The accuracy and efficiency of the voice assistant’s four-tone recognition is also good. However, the current car system is not yet the final version, and there are still some flaws in terms of functionality, such as the theme selection of ambient lights, which goes from “Theme 1, Theme 2… all the way to Theme 7”. At the same time, the rendering of ambient lights in the car still has room for improvement, especially with the Avita 11 equipped with “Vortex Emotional Eddies”.

To nitpick, the seat cushion is slightly shorter. However, the four-seater version supports a 40° angle adjustment for the rear seats, which is still very comfortable to sit on.

As the last group of test drivers on city roads, I “forced” myself to listen to Avita CEO Tan Benhong communicate with everyone for a long time. His practical attitude filled me with goodwill towards Avita. The previously criticized rear Type-C port position has been moved below the rear air outlet in this experience.

Overall, in this test drive, the Avita 11’s chassis texture, NVH control, and audio performance were very outstanding, but there were also some minor regrets. On the one hand, the experience time was not long enough to know about energy consumption performance, and on the other hand, I did not experience intelligent driving.

This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.