How exactly does the boot “close and lock” button work?

You are correct, you need the physical key for it to work.

Right ok, thanks, I suppose that sort of makes sense, though it’d be nice if it could just check if your phone was Bluetooth connected in the app or not. Maybe down the line. It’s a great car to drive but there’s so much low hanging fruit they could really easily fix.

The physical key range is actually pretty low. If I'm standing at the driver's door, and my wife presses the button, the "close and lock" function at the boot won't work. If that kind of proximity is their design requirement, it would be pretty hard to implement for Bluetooth, I think. I get what you're saying though - there's quite a few things that can be improved. Luckily a lot of it (for me) is just software.

Yep for sure, it's all software for the most part. Also I could understand them being really stringent if it were a button to unlock the car, but locking it by pressing a button when you clearly were already able to unlock the car to have the boot open in the first place seems a bit.. unnecessary. Not the end of the world at all, just one of the small things they'll hopefully fix down the line I guess.

I managed to get it to work without the physical key, by accident, the other day. I'd used the app to unlock the car, and out of habit pushed it to close the boot etc. Surprisingly, it closed and locked the car too. Fortunately my phone was in my pocket, not in the car

Ok interesting, I’ve tried it a bunch of times and it’s never done anything, but it wouldn’t be the first time the software in this car acts a bit unpredictable so who knows!

You should try looking at the manual, it’s available on the center console, has a great search function

The manual shows the areas which are covered for key recognition: https://i.imgur.com/Hj3GjeE.png 1 = area for entry 2 = area for starting the car