I picked up a '25 Subaru Solterra (rebadged Toyota bz4X) for a decent lease deal and while I'm surprised how little I think about the EV parts the "car parts" are dreadful.
I really need to do a write-up on the dichotomy of EV things being good (charger works, no real battery QC issues, it's a RAV4-but-EV) while all of the shared ICE parts (anything in the software stack) are riddled with bugs or head-scratching defaults.
Overall, a fine car for me, but (as much as I do not like El*n) Telsa is so significantly beyond their offerings it's hard to overstate.
EDIT:
I forgot to add but I think the cost savings for EVs can be a wash, make sure you check the following:
1.) can't charge at home / live in an apartment.
1a.) If you do install a L2 charger at home, you will significantly reduce your cost savings.
2.) you rely on fast-chargers in any significant capacity.
3.) Double check the math on any lease, loan, etc. on new EVs vs. a beater gas car. Especially if you pay an EV tax in your state or country. (Post-COVID the $2K beater car seems to have gone extinct here...)
in contrast, i bought a 2026 Subaru Uncharted, which is a clean sheet EV design, collaboration on powertrain components between Subaru and Toyota, and it's awesome. My BMW i4 xdrive 40 handled worse, had software bugs, cost about 50% more, and had a cheaper interior with truly stupid engineering choices, but you could choose from more colors. I had a clean sheet ev design i3 for about 8 years before that and it was cool.
I wonder, from your comments, and my cars, if the trick is ev-only designs, as the Solterra has various altered versions, as did the i4, whereas my i3 and Uncharted were designed only to be EVs.
edit: charging L2 at home is great, to your point.
I hadn't heard of the uncharted, sounds like it's closer to a C-HR electric than anything else? not that there's anything wrong with that. I love subes and drive an old one but they have a certain vibe that I wonder if the Toyota collab takes away.
all kind of academic since I'm planning on getting a slate but it's nice to know Subaru is bouncing back from that Solterra disaster.
I got a used EV about 3 years ago and I don't think I saved money. The car lost 10,000 CAD in value. I have to pay the dealer for repairs and maintenance, which is really expensive. I only drive about 15,000 km per year, so even though I mainly charge at home, I don't think the money saved on gas is more than the money lost in other ways. I'm actually in the process of changing to a 2010 Toyota Yaris. Cheap DIY maintenance, good fuel economy, cheap insurance, super reliable etc etc. And I like the idea of having actual buttons and no screens, a manual shifter, and even a car that goes vroom.
We looked at the Solterra in 2025 and it was genuinely awful, I can't believe anyone who works at a car company looked at it and thought "this is substantially better and will sell more than the Pontiac Aztek despite aesthetically and practically being worse in many regards". The interior center console feels like a prank, almost.
I never will (also because of Elon), but this comment makes me curious to experience a Tesla. Are they really so much better? I've heard endless bad things about their build quality.
After returning a '25 Mercedes EQB (employee lease), I bought a used '23 Solterra, and it seems like a better than linear downgrade (that is, the overall experience is a bit worse, but the price is lower by more than how much worse it is). The software and interface are all completely fine, and stay out of the way of driving and Android Auto. And I'm rather glad for the lack of some of the bells and whistles, because the dashboard screen on the MB had too much going on.
I own very first model Y, but wouldn’t buy the facelift. Changing gears swiping touchscreen is too much despite many real improvements. Build quality is definitely not premium, but it was single electrical vehicle I was able to afford and use as a substitute for petrol car. Many others at the time were good only as 2nd or 3rd car in the household.
I had a 21 Y, and now a 26. If you actually buckle your seat belt and turn on the feature, the car will auto select the correct gear without needing to do....anything. After a short while you get used to it on the rare occasions you do need to swipe the screen to change gear. Another thing I didn't notice during test drives, is that it does actually have permanent gear shifting controls - they're just by the hazard light (not a great place to use them often, but still there).
At least for me, the 26 is so much better built and fixed the insane body roll the 21 had that I'm quite happy with it.
My wife has also been full-EV for 5 years, first with a Kia Niro EV and now with a Hyundai Ioniq 9. Those are pretty good as "real car" EVs as well, though not without their own quirks (and, unfortunately, the Ioniq 9 recently had to have the ICCU replaced, as Hyundai still seemingly hasn't figured that problem out over the years).
EVs only really have forward and reverse, so I assume that's the automatic switching it does. Why in the world would you want a car to automatically switch between them? Even if that worked perfectly that doesn't sound all that helpful, and anything less than absolutely perfect sounds at best really annoying, and at worst dangerous.
Not to say that the Solterra's is ideal either. It's an awkward dial shifter below the HVAC controls, but at least it's a physical interface.
> Even if that worked perfectly that doesn't sound all that helpful, and anything less than absolutely perfect sounds at best really annoying, and at worst dangerous.
It works but it's a lot slower than just using the stalk or even the on screen shifter. But that's probably because I got used to not needing to come to a stop before switching gears.
It's based on your surroundings and probably the car's recent movements. To get it to switch you have to do a series of actions which should pretty much confirm that it's what you want to do. For example, if you're backing out of a parking space it'll only trigger a switch to drive if you come to a stop and then turn the wheel some amount to switch to drive. It tells you what to do on screen if you want to trigger it and don't know how.
I've been in my friends Model 3 many times and it's full of "oh why didn't anyone think of this before" and EV-centric choices. There's stupid stuff too (no turning stalks or shifter) but even ignoring the software choices it's really that much better of a car.
> The software and interface are all completely fine
Perhaps whatever platform mine, my friends corolla and friends taco are on is just busted but I wish it had even 70% reliability of just working when I'm using anything software related.
The build quality has improved significantly, though I would not put them on the level of a Toyota or anything. Maybe Ford.
The software is mostly quite a lot better, the quality of the infotainment exceeds almost anything else you can buy. The remote control ability is also exceptional. But they have glaring omissions like a refusal to support CarPlay. Or a persistent need to prove that vision can replace a bog standard IR rain sensor (it still cannot).
They do get some things right that for whatever reason seem difficult to get from other makers (like a simple climate hold when you park, or dog mode). And love it or hate it, FSD is light years ahead of anything else you can buy as a consumer. I won't pay for it, because I like to drive, but it now exceeds any expectation I ever had for it. I would wager that if I put grandma's house in the nav system and told the car to drive all the way there (about 175 miles distant), it would most probably take me all the way from my garage to grandma's driveway (and park) without me doing anything other than putting it in drive and hitting start.
I loathe Elon and this was a pretty big consideration, but I do not make purchases based on single factors, and overall the value proposition was impossible to ignore. Partly this is because there is basically zero competition for an M3P.
I got a Model 3 in 2020 and I still don't see anything competitive from other manufacturers. There are so many little things that it does right. You pair your phone with the car, so when you walk up to it and pull on the door handle, it opens. If you're not next to the car and someone else tries to open the door, it's locked. Each driver has their own profile which saves things like UI preferences, acceleration settings, seat position, side mirror angles, climate control, etc. So if my wife was the last person to drive the car and I open the driver's side door, the seat moves to my position. The mirrors adjust to my settings, and so on.
Even though my car has the older hardware, the self-driving is far beyond anything else I've used. It makes road trips far less tiring. I basically sit in the driver's seat while it drives from charging station to charging station. I've gone hundreds of miles without touching the steering wheel. Usually I intervene because I want to park in a specific spot, as the car tends to choose spots that are less convenient. Also it likes to park in my neighbor's driveway instead of mine. (The driveways are about 5 feet apart.)
The phone app lets you control all kinds of stuff remotely. I like to turn on the climate control before going to the car, that way my kid's car seat won't be uncomfortably warm on a sunny day. You can view the cameras from your phone, lock/unlock the car, open/close the windows, and open the trunk & frunk. And it works anywhere there's cell network connectivity, not just within direct radio range of the car.
I'd love it if more cars had these sorts of features, but I don't see it happening any time soon. Tesla seems to be a software company that happens to make cars, while everyone else is a car company that happens to make some software.
I've had not a single "quality issue" with my Model 3 other than the cabin air filter. The car interior stinks worse than any other car I've owned, if it isn't replaced on time! I too have heard a ton of bad things on Reddit. Then I went on the subreddits where people actually owned them. Those folks really seemed to like their cars. I can't say I LOVE the car... removing turn signals, wiper controls and ability to physically shift into reverse seem like brain-dead moves. Otherwise though? It's a lovely care to drive.
Lol the cabin air filter issue is legit but you just need to learn how to change it and it'd an easy fix.
It is funny how bad it gets when it starts stinking though, I was scared of changing it so I tried to ride it out for awhile and it was not a good idea
Yeah, I'm actually pretty mechanically inclined but for some reason, I just don't want to bring any tools near this thing.... it feels like an appliance!
> can't say I LOVE the car... removing turn signals, wiper controls and ability to physically shift into reverse seem like brain-dead moves. Otherwise though? It's a lovely care to drive.
I feel similarly. When I use the touchscreen to reverse direction, I grimace every time at the silly design. Or when the wipers do a dry wipe on a bright sunny day. But when I drive, it's all smiles, especially when I punch it (I have an M3P, and while it is no Plaid, it is fast enough to make people giggle).
The launch is exactly what convinced me to get one. My brother-in-law had a Model S that he took me on a ride in. From a dead stop, he floored it and I was sold. The Model 3 has a pretty decent ride too (the Highland refresh).
Does Eyesight beep at you frequently? My 2020 Outback beeps every time it can't see the lanes, which is about once a mile where I live. I'll probably never by another Subaru because of that issue alone.
Until quite recently, the reasonably feature complete open source libraries available for things like DICOM or HL7 were old C/C++ libraries, Java, and C#. That often created a choice between Java and C#. People not doing Windows based development tend not to be interested in C#.
Is it? My experience from 2014 - 2018, was that C# was only used in the lifesciences software for Windows, and as wrappers around device drivers mostly written in COM.
Everything that was done on the backend side was done in Java, although there were some exceptions for .NET deployments.
So we ended up with mixed skills teams where depending on the ticket, you would be coding Java or C#.
We embedded angular in our old Java client for hospitals. The user thinks he just opens a new window, but it's chrome in Java, which opens angular frontend, for our Java backend.
I've run OpenBSD continuously at home without backup power for something like eight years. They probably loose power about once or twice a quarter. I have yet to detect lost data that was important. Measures are taken. If a storm is coming through, I'll shutdown till it passes.
I've been lucky with release driver support. The little Lenovo ThinkCentre's being used seem to chug along without crashing on driver issues, at least with OpenBSD releases.
The standard OpenBSD partitioning scheme is also being used. Boot time fsck has never failed when the storage was properly attached and in a good state. Backups are performed using pax. So far, so good.
Are you sure it's not just a dodgy SSD that simply failed to persist data when losing power mid-write? I've had my share of sudden power cuts upon OpenBSD during the past 20+ years, and FFS has so far never gone corrupt on me.
Drive is a 2TB Intel 670p NVMe SSD (INTEL SSDPEKNU020TZ) with 9078 power on hours and 42TBW - so pretty spry, but not at the start of the bathtub curve either.
It was mounted as fast storage for a Bitcoin node.
Perhaps the only 'unique' thing is it is using a NVMe to PCIe adapter card (Synology M2D20) due to this being my "legacy" server that's still rocking a Broadwell chip.
That does sound pretty spry. But it doesn't rule out that it utilizes slow storage which is fronted by a (too) large RAM buffer making the device appear much faster than it really is. Most SSDs are like this.
FFS corrupted multiple times on me, with intel video driver freezing on OpenBSD. My short OpenBSD sidetrack ended after reliably corrupting itself the third time... every time video driver panicking, leaving a corrupted filesystem after reboot, when I had eg. ports install going on during panic.
Windows ran fine on the machine (Lenovo 200) before, and Linux ran fine after. FFS (and the intel video drivers) are the weakest part of OpenBSD in my experience, I liked many other aspects.
If writes are happening while the power cuts you will lose that data. Journaling doesn't help against this. FFS will need a consistency check if it doesn't "unmount cleanly", but this isn't the same as the file system having been corrupted and losing data. If something really got corrupted and it was something else besides what you were writing in the moment the machine died, it sounds like a lot of data (for whatever reason large amounts of data was still buffered; usually an SSD is the reason) just hadn't persisted yet. With the exception of the old unadvisable softdeps feature, FFS doesn't defer a lot of writing. And It's possible to tell FFS to be fully synchronous, with the caveat that it becomes even slower than the sluggish performer it already is.
Most organizations that use Java tend to be pretty conservative with their technology picks and nowadays with newer Java versions the only real gap with Kotlin is null-safety which is supposed to also come to Java at some point.
There is also an organization culture component most of the time, one our engineers actually proposed to use Kotlin for one of the new projects but it got rejected because "We are a Java shop"
> Most organizations that use Java tend to be pretty conservative with their technology picks
That part i s true.
> with newer Java versions the only real gap with Kotlin is null-safety
But that part isn't. Kotlin has:
- Structured Concurrency: Coming to Java sometime in the future, but it's been in preview for very long now.
- Standalone functions that don't have to live in classes
- Properties
- Property delegation
- Data classes: more powerful than records. Can be used for large DTOs that you can modify with copy(). Java needs something like Lombok to make records more useful.
- Extension methods
- Context parameters
- Operator overloading
- Implementation delegation
- Inline functions (which can receive returning closures and reified types)
- Block syntax (supports `it` for unnamed arguments)
- Sequence abstractions: more powerful and more efficient than Java streams due to the inlining and block syntax.
This is just a partial list, but Kotlin clearly has a lot of things that Java doesn't. If you only personally care about NPEs that's fine, but that's not the only thing.
I think the two languages mean slightly different things here. In any case, Java's model is so much more simpler that I don't think they are honestly comparable. In kotlin's case you have to be very on top of your game to have a chance of correctly using it - there is concurrency, parallelism, exception handling all combined into a single abstraction in a non-native way - so your stack traces will be useless/swallowed etc on incorrect usage. Of course the usual caveat applies, just use java's abstraction if you need that.
> Standalone function
Don't really see the benefit, if anything it creates place for style disagreements. A SomethingUtil class was just fine (and findable).
> Properties
Difficult topic with both cons and pros.
> Data classes
Exactly because they are "more powerful" they are strictly worse. A design element is just as much about what it is as it isn't. Copy is good though.
> Delegation
Used a couple of times, but it's not the full blown thing (see manifold)
> Extension method
I will be honest, I really dislike these. They can occasionally help a bit with some DSL, but for the most part they just make code very hard to read. I much prefer a normal static method instead.
> Context parameters
One of the few useful syntactic sugar.
> Operator overloading
Argued to death already :)
> Inline function
Feels more like a hack to support some of these extra features than something you would want to use yourself
> Block syntax
For the rare DSL usecase it's useful. Everywhere else I really dislike it and the accompanying coding style. These .also and similar implicit receiver thingies are just straight up evil.
All in all, there are a few things that are very elegant in kotlin, but I feel they went the c++ c# way of over abstracting just to have a long feature list.
Most likely because it was a behemoth, not because it was in Java. Would be curious to see how they like dealing with a golang behemoth instead (golang is much less suited for dealing with large codebases).
I use 1Password, RSS Button (To highlight if the page has a feed, so I can subscribe with my own Miniflux instance), 1Blocker (Ad blocking), Tampermonkey for loading userscripts on some websites, Readdeck extension to easily send something to my "read later" pile. It's not a lot of them, but every time I want to test a new one I dread it.
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