I have to agree with a fair amount of the things being said above.

Next stop announcements - some mistakes in these and not updated when stops are moved or new stops are added, the Sapphire 7 announcements are the same now as they were when launched in December 2013 and since then, a number of new bus stops have been placed on this route and have not been added and then there's the fact they think Rushyford is near Durham, a stop in Woodham comes up on the screen but there's no audio announcement and even more randomly, the Pulsar's and E400's refer to this same stop in two different ways, no announcements at all on morning runs to Framwellgate Moor. Similar issues on the 5/5A routes at Darlington although it's rare to see anything other than the Arriva logo on those, 1465/66 have never had any announcements since they were fitted. X21 hasn't had announcements for a while, Arriva programmed announcements in for the 21/X21 about a month before the full route became the X21 and sure enough they no longer worked when this change happened.

Plugs - it's at least a year possibly two since I complained to Arriva that none of the 7 allocation has plugs you can actually use, only change in this time is that 1515 randomly having its plugs replaced with USBs. Complaints on a regular basis on their Facebook about this and nothing changes.

Appearence - apart from the fleet numbers on the front, I can easily tell whether a Sapphire 7 Pulsar is a Darlington or Belmont example just by looking at the state of it, saw one of Belmont's examples the other night and a considerable amount of paintwork was missing, bodywork was also scratched and dented to hell, one of them was going round looking like it was repainted by small children using their hands, not helped by missing Sapphire logos. At least Darlington has finally sorted that shoddy looking bodge job panel on the front of 7538 from when it was based at Belmont (still requires a logo though). The very outdated 21/X21 branding just shows how much care and effort gets put in at times, the notices on buses about the X21 changes that came into effect yesterday even showed a photo (one of mine of course [emoji6]) of a EcoCity with the old branding in question. Some of the MAX Pulsar's on the 306 have yet to be branded.

One thing I complained to Arriva about recently was a lack of heat in any form on the top deck of our Sapphire 7 E400's on every journey I have made since about the end of September, mind I was amazed about a fortnight after completing to get a E400 that wasn't totally baltic like I had been enduring for a few months.