I bought a new salad spinner recently, after having broken yet another one.
I’ve had fancy brands like Zyliss and OXO. I’ve had cheap store brand models and cheaper Amazon MYSSNGVWL type stuff as well. Knowing they would probably break didn’t make it feel better when they eventually broke.
Anyway the new salad spinner is large, heavy, with a steel pin into a brass bushing, has a metal handle and nylon gears in a sealed gearbox with exposed stainless screws for servicing. I opened it up and greased it on first use, mostly just to pretend to be servicing it, just to see what that felt like. It felt good!
The best part is it came with a catalogue that had order codes for spare parts. They wanted to help you maintain it. It was built to last and the manufacturer was on your side.
The [Slate Truck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Truck) seems to be marketing itself with this in mind. But it's backed by Jeff Bezos, so proceed with caution.
Don't they use the same IEC 62196 ports as other EVs, outside the US?
They made their own in the US, because the standard SAE J1772 combo port is an unweildy behemoth, then they released the patent into public domain, and the rest of the automotive industry adopted their port into the NACS port, which beats both IEC 62196 and SAE J1772 in available power, all in a much smaller and easier-to-use connector.
That it should be possible for somebody with a reasonable understanding of car maintenance to actually fix or maintain their car instead of having a blob of proprietary nonsense only meant to lock you in and milk your wallet with mandatory dealer repairs and subscriptions.
Looks like a great car. As Marques Brownlee puts it [1], this is Rivian's "Model Y fighter". And I personally find the R2 to be much more appealing than a Model Y in terms of size, shape, and interior.
But we have been misled so many times about EV prices prior to launch, I think it's important to wait until we see what it actually costs for different trim levels before making comparisons to the Model Y. That $45,000 price they are throwing around could very well be for a trim that isn't even available at launch.
And anyway if I were going to buy a new compact crossover today, I'd probably lean more toward the RAV4 PHEV. It's an EV most of the time, I can refill it up with gas during long trips, it's got tactile buttons, and it has carplay.
None of these car reviewers ever take into account build quality and customer issues. Example they all lashihly praised the EX90, but owners struggled for a year with software problems, then found out the LIDAR they paid for is never going to assist their driving and they need a new computer. Same with Rivian, all of today's reviews praise the R2, but ignore the troubles current owners have not just with the car but with getting service too.
Never buy a first year model and then keep an eye on owners forums before you buy.
One of the good things in the UK is seeing how quickly my neighbours swapped out their Tesla's for BYD's.
I'm not in the market at the moment so don't know what the UK protectionism position is on Chinese EV's, but has been interesting to watch how quick it's happening.
I work in design and we're talking to two Chinese EV companies launching in the UK this year, so the wall can't be that high for them.
The UK has a local car manufacturing industry (Nissan, Jaguar/Landrover), but not large enough to be able to lobby for protectionism. And in any case the UK has basically given up on having a coherent trade policy since Brexit.
I've seen quite a few BYDs and MG4s, and there are Jaecoo and Leapmotor dealers near me. I've been told that some NHS boards were using MGs as "pool" cars, but the only example I can find a reference for is Shetland. https://www.nhsshetland.scot/news/article/43/nhs-shetland-ro...
Imo its not anti-China protectionism. Western models are cheaper in China, and Chinese models are more expensive in the EU & UK.
I think it's a combination of manufacturers wanting a higher profit, some adaptations & certification processes, dealer and service infrastructure necessary for selling in the West that just costs more.
I don't think Chinese manufacturers will be able to significantly undercut the competition while maintaining a desirable quality
Same here! American-made EVs ask for an incredibly heavy price tag and don’t deliver on the reliability of ICE or Hybrid cars a third of their price. It’s the primary thing stopping me from getting one as my next vehicle.
I’m trying to shop around to replace my wife’s aging crossover and I really can’t find anything more attractive than a Prius or another Kia Soul. If we could get electric cars from the CN market it’d be a no-brainer!
I’ve had software issues on an ID4 and iX, but I’ve never had reliability problems. The cars always have just worked with no maintenance. Same with my model Y, minus any issues!
Maybe it’s a “but when it happens you’re screwed” situation. I’m thinking of the story of BMW’s battery safety fuse (the one that trips in an accident to protect first responders and the people in the car) actually tripping when you hot the curb or a pothole harder. It requires a very expensive trip to the dealer. Some of my Tesla owning friends keep spending time in the shop getting something about the suspension fixed 2-3 times already.
I have no idea if Chinese EVs are consistently better, Volvo can be seen as one and I don’t think they excel at reliability lately.
P.S. Software issues are reliability issues. The software is a core part of the car and its value proposition, you can’t discount them as “just software issues, not reliability”.
Everyone commented on the battery life for my model 3 in winter (which is annoying but not a huge deal). The problems with the bushings, the easily cracked (2500$) roof glass, and the lack of spare parts (not as bad as Rivian) were drowned out.
Love the car, but wouldn't have bought it for the price I paid (used) if I had known.
The R2 looks great but like you said, never buy a first year model.
Day 1 reviews, the ones that drives sales of any product, are flawed by definition. They take a narrow and superficial view of the product, a snapshot when what you need is a timelapse.
The winter tires that score great on day 1 but put a bit of wear on them and they turn to crap. The motherboard that scores the highest in the benchmarks at launch but later on burns your CPU, or gets a BIOS update that caps the performance, or gets no updates whatsoever. The car that shines at acceleration and feature list but breaks down often and is slow and expensive to fix.
Day 1 reviews certainly have some value but it’s higher for the reviewer than for the potential buyer. By the time the reviewer follows up after battle testing in time, if they even want to risk looking like they got it wrong the first time, the damage was done. And people aren’t that interested in reading about old stuff, those reviews don’t get the views.
I watched one of those Out Of Spec videos on an earlier Rivian and it was full of praise and raving. Then there was a later video where they almost on the side mentioned when it came out of the factory it felt legitimately unsafe to drive on the highway and had already spent days at service including a total powertrain shutdown, essentially a lemon. These things happened already in the time before their first video yet were never mentioned. That entire YouTube review industry is more rotten and bought than the same show on Cable TV ever was..
Also Doug Demuro raves about it [1]. Personally I can't stand Marques' reviews. Just inspiring and he looks bored. Doug on the other hand really seems to put some of his soul into his reviews.
Right you are Ken, but the format pretty much is his schtick. It’s not that entertaining at all anymore, but it’s also decent to know that a review will probably exist for most cars I’m ever considering.
For me his value remains mainly that he’s tall which I am too, so when he’s in a car I can guess what it’ll be like for me.
If even Doug falls out of favor.. then I don't know anymore. His voice doesn't bother me too much but he sure has a lot of energy just to keep talking. Never stops talking.
The RAV4 EV capacity is so small, the electric engine so weak (cuts to gas well before highway speed), and the charge speed so slow, that in practice its a 100% gas car. Only a small number of disciplined owners are going to be able to run it as an EV most of the time, as its actually impractical to do so.
This is completely false. I own one. It goes up to the low 80s mph before the gas engine kicks in. Acceleration from a stop is sub 6 second 0-60. Hardly weak. Charges from fully empty to full in about 2.5 hours.
Mine gets a 40-45 mile all electric range. I drive 10-12k miles per year, and ignoring extended multi-day vacation road trips once every couple years, I fill up the tank 2-3 times per year.
My experience with my Prius PHEV is the same. I don’t even have a level 2 charger. I just plug it in in the garage overnight, and most days I don’t use any gas.
The only time the ICE turns on before my EV range is up is if I hit the windshield defrost button when it’s cold. That’s presumably to prioritize getting heat out through the vents quickly. I’ve never accelerated fast enough, nor gone fast enough to trigger the ICE engine taking over. It’s straight up an EV for my first ~40 miles every day.
That sounds like the real issue, vs. EVs. This sounds like you basically have to plug it in every time you park it. And there’s no way you could do any sort of (even small) road trip without using gas.
(For comparison, our EV6 has about 200-250 mile range, and we charge it about once a week or so, give or take, unless we take a road trip.)
Also, one of the main advantages with EVs is their insane low maintenance, but sounds like PHEVs still have to all the same maintenance issues of ICE vehicles.
> This sounds like you basically have to plug it in every time you park it. And there’s no way you could do any sort of (even small) road trip without using gas.
> Also, one of the main advantages with EVs is their insane low maintenance, but sounds like PHEVs still have to all the same maintenance issues of ICE vehicles.
I keep seeing this repeated, but I kept a detailed decade-plus spreadsheet of maintenace costs for my last ICE car, and ~2/3 of the costs were for components that are common to EVs.
1. Maintenance isn’t just about cost. It’s about the number of things that move and/or need fluids, and can fail/leak. It’s about dealing with service centers trying to upsell you on every little possible thing that could go wrong.
When I take my EV in, it’s for one of two things: I need my tires rotated, or I need new tires. That’s it. There’s no “curtsy inspection” that comes back with literally 40 different things that I could have done to it.
2. Our household has four vehicles: one EV, three ICE vehicles. There’s no way the occasional new tires (rotations are free where we bought our tires) amount to 2/3 the cost of the maintenance needed on our ICE vehicles. It’s probably closer to 1/10.
I think you’re overestimating what all needs maintenance on an EV.
> and am familiar with which items are common to an EV.
This is the overestimating I was referring to. I think you’re either mistaken in what items are common to EV, or you’re overestimating the cost of those items.
There is only one thing that needs maintenance on an EV: tires.
Unless you’re saying that tires amount to 2/3 of an ICE vehicles maintenance. In which case you may want to shop around for more reasonably priced tires.
Not the person you replied to, but I'm not sure how you arrived here. Brakes, coolant, washer fluid, diff oil, gearbox oil, cabin air filter, wiper blades. Did you know EV motors can also require oil changes (at hundreds of thousands of miles, in fairness)?
Nice Michelins for my ICE have been something resembling 1/3 of service costs. Not 2/3 but not negligible either.
Maybe at 1/10 the schedule of ICE vehicles, at least for me. I use regenerative braking almost exclusively (probably 95+% of the time).
> coolant
Yes, I did forget about that one. But frequency is about 50% less often than ICE vehicles. Maybe once every 5-10 years.
> washer fluid, cabin air filter, wiper blades
Agreed on these as well, but I bucketed these in the trivial category, totaling less than a tank of gas once every 6-12 months, and all DIY things that you don’t need to take to a service center for.
At the end of the day, I only care about things I need to take it to the shop for. Which means I only need to take it in for a no-questions-asked tire rotation 1-2 times a year, and new tires every 4-5 years. Everything else I can easily do at home.
> diff oil, gearbox oil
These are the same thing, but you’re correct. But it’s infrequent (maybe once or twice over the life, and around $150.
> Did you know EV motors can also require oil changes
> Maybe at 1/10 the schedule of ICE vehicles, at least for me. I use regenerative braking almost exclusively (probably 95+% of the time).
In practice, my brakes always corrode from road salt and fuel-efficient driving habits and need replacing long before I actually wear them down, so regen brakes are largely irrelevant to brake life.
> Which means I only need to take it in for a no-questions-asked tire rotation 1-2 times a year, and new tires every 4-5 years. Everything else I can easily do at home.
So that sounds... basically the same as my ICE. Two shop visits per year for tire changes, one oil change per year at the same time as one of the tire changes.
There are many things that break or need maintenance on my ICE vehicles that I don’t want to mess with myself: oil changes, transmissions, alternators, belts, engine issue (oil leaks). Engine air filters are about the only ICE-specific piece I don’t mind doing myself.
Re: brakes, where I live, I don’t think salt will play much a factor, and not sure what you mean by “fuel efficient driving” wearing your brakes, but I’m using regenerative braking 95+% of the time.
Again, probably only relevant for extremely long term ownership, but someone will need to own and maintain all the high mileage decade-old EVs a decade from now.
ICE maintenance is pretty cheap, with the exception of tires, which are a huge outlay (but also the most important safety item!). My Honda only needs $35 of oil/filter once a year, maybe $40 of brake pads once in 80,000 miles, and a burned out bulb for a few bucks. Top tires all around though, easily $600-$800. A few one time things around the 100k mile mark, maybe plugs/sparkys/belt or similar, but not regular in any sense, most cars will only have them ever done once.
> seatbelt receptacle, a cruise control buttons, roof exterior rubber trim, a headrest, a window switch, washer fluid spray nozzles, lug nuts, wiper blades, shocks, struts, door weather stripping, rivets holding the front plastic splashguard on, headlight bulbs, headlight buffing, washer fluid reservoir cap, replacement speaker, turn signal switch, windshield repair, backup light switch.
Other than washer fluid, wiper blades, and the occasional headlight bulb, many of these I’ve never had to replace on any of my vehicles (ICE or EV), and the few that I’ve had to replace was maybe once on one car.
I feel like you’re an unlucky sample of 1.
Most of my ICE vehicles needed none of these, and only things related to ICE vehicles (oil/fluid changes, brake pads/rotors oil leaks, transmissions, alternators, belts).
I think you also might be overestimating what the average ICE owner has to take care of.
Most Americans don’t keep a car long enough to even pay it off - they’re in an endless loop of trade-ins, meaning that most non-accident damage is covered by warranty.
I’ve had my current ICE car for just over 5 years now and finally paid my first out of pocket repair cost: $40 for a new washable air filter. Other than that, my expenditures have been tires and a couple hundred bucks in oil changes that I didn’t want to do myself.
> I think you also might be overestimating what the average ICE owner has to take care of.
> Most Americans don’t keep a car long enough to even pay it off - they’re in an endless loop of trade-ins, meaning that most non-accident damage is covered by warranty.
No, I think you may be underestimating. According to this article [1] at least, it’s close to 13 years. That’s well into large/costly maintenance items.
Maybe on HN, people don’t keep their cars long enough to need new brakes or transmission flush, but that’s not typical.
Curious for the big examples. Some major things EVs don’t have: oil changes, belts/chains, transmissions, most things related to the engine & drive train are different… seems like the main similarities would be tires, brakes, body work, amenities.
No the GP, but in the 10 years of owning my ICE vehicle I've had these things serviced:
Oil change/Oil filter, Spark plugs, Alternator belt, Aircon belt, Brake pads, Brake fluid, Wiper blades, Wiper fluid, 12V battery, Tyres, an accessory fuse, a jammed seatbelt buckle. Two of the power locks are a bit sticky and probably need a touch-up of oil.
The first 4 are ICE-only, and brake pads are worn less if you mostly use regen. The rest are the same on EVs.
And by far the biggest cost of car ownership (for new cars at least) is depreciation. And EVs depreciate rapidly - enough to offset the costs of oil changes I imagine. And I actually like bringing my car into the dealer twice a year for service. I get to wander around and check out what's new, eat some free snacks, shoot the breeze with my dealer about what's happening in the industry, and then spend the rest of the time on my laptop. Maybe this is sad to admit, but I actually kind of look forward to it.
That being said, if you're in the market for a used EV right now, that depreciation actually works in your favor. I was looking at prices on used luxury EVs recently, and have to admit I was pretty tempted by some 2-3 year old cars selling at less than half MSRP.
Toyotas hybrid uses gas when you accelerate hard to get that 0-60, it’s a combined system horsepower. Unlike phevs, EREVs are only driven by the electric drive, and the gas system is a series generator, so the EV is fully capable & always doing 100% of the work. PHEVs fundamentally aren’t.
Anyway, the real world data from PHEV usage shows you are the outlier, most people don’t bother plugging them in regularly due to their limitations.
Again, false. You can clearly hear when the combustion engine kicks in and it's indicated in the dash. I can floor it in electric mode and it still gets up to 60 in around 6 seconds, no gas involved. Hybrid mode is probably slightly faster but it's a very marginal difference.
I don't believe your last statement because you've been wrong about everything else, and it doesn't make sense. Plugging it in is exactly as easy as literally any electric car, and it simply doesn't have the limitations you claim it does.
I don't know what you've been reading, but you should evaluate the veracity of it as a source and talk to actual owners. I know several others who have one and we're all quite happy with them and don't get gas often
“ The researchers attributed most of the gap to overestimates of the “utility factor” – the ratio of miles travelled in electric mode to the total miles travelled – finding that 27% of driving was done in electric mode even though official estimates assumed 84%. ”
Perhaps the rav4 prime @ 41ml max ev range is a better system than all the other low range PHEVs like it, and has better real world usage data than them. I doubt it though, but I don’t have the data on just the rav.
It's an interesting article - thanks for sharing! The original report is worth reading too. [1]
I agree with the premise. The "utility factor" used to estimate fuel efficiency for PHEVs does not line up with real-world data, which effectively creates a loophole to avoid emissions regulations and keep selling gas guzzlers. This is a problem, and should be fixed.
In regards to which cars are most to blame:
> Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and BMW account for the lion’s share of fines avoided over the past three years, together responsible for 89% of the total.
This is a recent trend where luxury carmakers are using PHEVs to circumvent emissions regulations. The latest BMW M5 [2], for example, is a PHEV with a monster 4.4L V8 engine. Car enthusiasts actually hate it compared to the old model because the hybrid system increased the weight by 1000 lbs. But making it a PHEV is probably the only way that BMW is still able to sell a V8. It seems kind of stupid all around.
The RAV4 PHEV is also a big, heavy (4,500 lb) car with a large (by European standards) 2.5L engine. But I would hesitate to lump it in with luxury cars from BMW, Mercedes, Land Rover, etc. I would also hesitate to apply findings from a European study to the US market, where large gasoline cars are currently very popular (not that every discussion needs to be about the US - but the RAV4 is the best selling car in the US so it's important to that market). Not saying you're wrong about RAV4 PHEV emissions relative to the gasoline RAV4, just that the study you linked doesn't really support making any specific claims about that model. The report only mentions Toyota once, where it is lumped into an "others" category on a chart along with Ford, Hyundai, JLR, Kia, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, and Suzuki.
There are reasons to buy a PHEV even if you never plug it in. Their electric motors tend to output more power than HEV versions of the same model, leading to more performance and a quieter drivetrain (even with the engine running, it doesn't have to work as hard). You can also run climate control and infotainment while parked without having to idle the engine, which is nice when waiting around on a hot day. Or you can remotely start the air conditioner with your phone.
Basically you can get EV quality-of-life features on a gasoline-powered vehicle.
I probably wouldn't recommend a PHEV to someone who doesn't have a place to plug it in every day. But there are reasons to buy a PHEV beyond just fuel efficiency.
The cars fine. It’s great it works for him. I wouldn’t personally buy one today when lots of options for real BEVs exist, but you do you.
What I do care about, and why I care that he’s an outlier, is that low range PHEVs mainly exist to get emissions credits for manufacturers so that they can sell more gas cars, and those emission savings aren’t real [1]. You could say everyone’s dumb for using them this way, but clearly the ergonomics of the electrical capabilities in this category are lacking in important ways.
And I can’t prove it but I bet the manufacturers have known this for a long time. But adding a plug to a hybrid with a tiny battery was an awfully cheap way to get your existing car counted as “green” for credits, so too tempting.
I watched MKBHD’s review versus Doug DeMuro’s and only one of them took the time to point out the tailgate window and wipers. One reviews cars the other reviews gadgets.
I watched both Marques' review and Doug's, and yeah Doug's was better. I linked the MKBHD review because mainly I wanted to make the Model Y comparison, and Marques called it a "Model Y fighter" in the video title.
And also, Doug feels a little out of touch to me these days. Less about "quirks and features" that appeal to me (although he still covers that), and more about "enthusiast cars" (like his million dollar Porsche and Lambo) that don't really interest me. Although to be fair MKBHD isn't much better in that regard.
The only thing I'd miss about the MY is the 7-seat feature. I love the fact that you can technically cram two more people in the car on the occasional times when you need to, without needing to drive a giant 7-seat boat. I wish more mid-size electric SUVs did the same.
That's not surprising. The point isn't to use it to regularly drive tall adults around back there. It's for when your family of four needs to take two of your kids' friends somewhere, that kind of thing. We probably use it once every couple of months, but it's super handy at those times, and folds away out of sight and mind the rest of the time.
The RAV4 Prime is extremely hard to get if you live outside of SoCal and maybe a few other areas. I'm in the southeast and a few years ago the local dealer told me that this entire region is only allocated a few Prime's each quarter. Even today I've never seen one in the wild.
Not only that, but it sounds like dealerships are still hardcore ripping off people who want to buy a RAV4 Prime. $20k over MSRP, refusing to sell without add-ons / warranty, etc.
The 23-25 RAV4 prime has a recall where the instrument cluster goes blank. AFAIK the whole thing needs to be replaced. Sounds just like the Ioniq ICCU issues.
Marques Brownlee is a kid who did shitty reviews of cell phones and is now a tech influencer, not an objective auto industry reviewer. He knows jack shit about the auto industry. Whatever comes out of his mouth is designed to make his clients - the companies who pay him to pimp their products - look as good as possible.
Rivians are wildly heavy and inefficient compared to the rest of the industry. The R1T weighs more than two of the heaviest version of the Ioniq 5, for example.
R1T owners seem to average about 2mi/kwhr, whereas the Ioniq 5 gets almost twice that...
Its fitting he would think the reference in EVs is the Model Y of all things, the technologically outdated, slow charging car whose sales are falling off a cliff while the manufacturer is trying to upsell you a monthly subscription for lane keeping.
here another review from my favorite car reviewer Mat Watson (carwow), from what I remember he complains about cleaning rear window wiper, but it feels all in all like paid ad
Toyota is claiming "up to 52 miles on a full charge" on the recently announced 2026 RAV4 PHEV [1]. For me that would be enough to cover the majority of my trips.
Looks like I was mistaken though and you can't actually buy the 2026 model yet (and the Toyota website still shows the older 2025 model). And as another commenter pointed out, it may not actually be possible to buy the older model either due to insufficient production.
The R2 was the first time I seriously thought about spending up on a vehicle.
It looks good.
But $45k++ is just wild to me. It seems like the market is undervaluing used EV’s, so hopefully the depreciation curve will bring these down to $30k in a couple years for us old-school folks who prefer not to have a $1000/mo car loan.
I'm a little confused why you think that's wild; It's pricing is inline with other BEV's in the Canadian market at least; it's comparing with the Model Y, the Equinox, the Blazer, the Mach e, the Ioniq 5, the EV6, the BZ4, and the Aryia.
Typically speaking you're going to spend $10,000 to $13,000 more then an equivalent gas car for a BEV vs a comparable gas car in Canada.
It’s just surprising to me that this is surprising to anyone in 2026. New cars are no longer $20-30k in the US and haven’t been since 2021. Average transaction price is now $50k+, so if companies like Rivian that skip the dealership model charge $45k, it really isn’t that expensive. The only new cars under $30k are sedans and hatchbacks. And most of them start at almost $27-30k for base price not including all the bs dealership fees.
The 45k is a myth for now. The vehicles that have been reviewed so far are going to be $60k+ performance models. We'll see if they actually get down to 45k.
From the analysis I've seen with that drag coefficient, the 45k vehicle is going to have to have a range of 220 to 260 miles. Hardly something that will fly off the shelves.
Small, efficient gasoline vehicles are prohibited by CAFE standards in the US, but EVs are exempt. Generally new EV manufacturers have been starting with high-end vehicles, and working their way into mid-range, with hopes on eventual low-range vehicles.
Because EVs are exempt from CAFE standards, it does open up a niche at the very low end, and Slate and Telo are starting up production in that market, so one of their vehicles might appeal to you.
ya same, i can't see spending as much as i did on my first tesla 5+ years ago, the depreciations just too steep, hopefully that holds for rivian too and i'll pick one up in a couple years the R2 is really nice.
That said, china BEV's are 1/2 the cost even accounting for import costs to the USA lol so sort of points toward a issue with US companies at the moment
Most people in California don’t have PG&E. Most of the land area in the northern 2/3 of the State or so is covered by PG&E, but people and land area aren't the same thing. Southern California Edison alone serves almost as many people as PG&E, and other smaller utilities, including public utilities like LADWP, SMUD, Silicon Valley Power, etc., serve another big chunk of the population.
Average price of a new vehicle in the US is $50,000. This is priced appropriately considering total cost of ownership delta against a combustion vehicle. Rivian needs more volume for prices to decline from manufacturing efficiency at scale.
A cursory search of the web shows that TCO for EVs in the US is higher than ICE for all but high mileage commuters. Wish it wasn't the case, but insurance alone is a 30% premium.
Insurance is a bear for Teslas. They cost a lot to repair.
The Model 3 Highland is super fun to drive. Maybe other EVs have this too. It's a very different experience to a similarly priced ICE car, and worth factoring in to the value proposition.
I specify Highland because the previous version was rattly and noisy enough to seriously detract from the zippy driving experience. Highland is nice.
NYT recently did a fantastic calculator. It isn't simple flat one or the other is cheaper. It takes into account buy vs lease, milage, local energy cost, length of ownership etc
How are insurers making any money insuring these things nowadays? 30% higher premiums are being mentioned elsewhere in the comments; that doesn't sound like enough!
>How are insurers making any money insuring these things nowadays?
Because insurance is fundamentally a "skim some" model.
They have a massive pool of money. Sure the pool is bleeding all the time because they're paying out, but it's also being replenished by premiums paid in. They invest this "constant" pool of money and the return on this covers overhead plus profit.
So when we're all getting screwed on our premiums because fenders cost tens of thousands and Karens file claims for parking scratches they're making more money, because the same ROI on a bigger pool of money is a bigger number.
People keep repeating this uncritically. There is a car-debt crisis, and wages haven't kept up with house/car costs.
We have one person saying "well in Californian wages..." and another saying essentially that 50K isn't a lot of money when the average SALARY is $66K/year.
I also believe this $50,000 stat is the mean car price which is likely to be pushed up by luxury car sales that cost 2-4x what a typical car costs, whereas a median price would give a better indication of what most people are actually spending. I did a quick Google search and wasn't able to find any data on median price, though.
I wonder how much of this ridiculous car money was previously buy-a-house money. If you don't think you'll ever buy a house, you might as well spend it on a car.
To what degree is this caused by car prices versus Americans' compulsion to keep buying new cars? Anecdotally, the folks I know struggling with car payments are almost exclusively in the latter bucket. But I'm open to having my mind changed with data.
Not entirely true; there are at least the lease, rental, and commercial fleet markets supplying predictable inventory of used cars to the public market.
I have 2014 Tesla S which which I recently had drive unit and battery replaced ($20k total). my friends all think I am nuts, but they all have $1k+ payments (some for 72m) while I haven’t had a car payment since 2017 and won’t have another one till 2036 :)
If your friends dumped $20K into paying off those loans they’d be a lot closer to paid off or maybe paid off completely, though. And that’s on a newer, lower mileage car.
I’m all for maintaining vehicles and keeping them on the road, but I don’t think you’re in a place to criticize your friends with $1K car payments after putting almost 2 years worth of those payments into a car that’s over a decade old.
As a European: nice, but why is it so BIG? How is that monster called "mid-size"? Why would one want to haul so many tons of extra metal around just to transport one's behind?
As a European (dutch), why are our roads so small, that normal sized cars look like "monsters". I have often thought, that Europe will have a problem in the future with roads, as they are just too small, and expanding and making them more safe, is unlikely to ever happen and often times impossible. Not everyone can get by with a small little hatchback, some of us need a big pickup (I own a building company). And for the people that do not need it from a commercial point of view, have you ever considered that people have hobbies and some hobbies needs a fair amount of space in a car? Or families with multiple kids doing sport need the space for all the gear?
I am worried that in the future, more and more european cities will just address the problem with a disguised "we are making the cities car free, and thus greener and safer". What that means for the average citizen out there is, that any building related work, will just become more expensive, as people will just charge more to get over the hassle of getting into the cities then.
I'm glad the roads are small. Smaller roads cause slower driving (well researched). As for the cities, it is unsustainable to use cars as the primary mode of transportation within cities. We do want to make cities greener and largely car-free, because cars for individuals simply do not make any sense in a city. We still need roads for deliveries and occasional transportation of heavy or large goods, but transporting yourself within a city should rarely be done in a car. See Tokyo for an example of a large metropolis which functions well and which would completely break down if everybody tried to use a car to get somewhere.
Can and want to or being efficient are different things. I "can" travel around in a city using public transport with 3 kids and all their sporting equipment, do I want to, no. Would any sane person want to? No.
see, this is the narrow minded view of so many europeans. Well just go to a closer sports club....is not an answer to the problem that thousands of people experience with small cars, and small roads.
As a European, I’ve been gently looking forward to Rivian’s R3 for years now. I like the design and it looks much more like a machine that will suit Europe.
>As a European: nice, but why is it so BIG? How is that monster called "mid-size"?
Because it's a nominal size more than a descriptive one. Midsize is the second biggest size with only "full size" stuff being bigger.
It made more sense 30-40yr ago when people who remembered when the domestic auto makers mostly only made a full-size, a midsize and a compact car were still alive and of prime car buying age.
I think insiders would tell you off the record not to get an R1, but that the R2s should be much more robust. Of course it's untested at this point, but hopefully that's the case.
I feel quite bad for people living in the United States. Despite the constant refrain about freedom y'all are actually pretty hindered when it comes to reasonably priced EVs.
On Saturday I put a down on a BYD Shark 6 truck. Hopefully I'll collect it Friday, if not early next week. I'm paying $41,200 USD for the thing brand new.
I saw a MotorTrend review of it last week, they flew down to Mexico City to test one out. The entry level pricing there is $50,060 USD.
Here in Australia they're called the "Raptor Killer" as they will take Ford Ranger Raptors off the line and cost a bit more than half the price of the Raptor.
If it's going to have a gasoline engine anyway, I'd much rather just get the Raptor. By the way, the Ford Ranger Raptor is not to be confused with the Ford F-150 Raptor which is a total beast.
It's funny that the software engineers on this forum are all obsessed with building scalable systems that can provide a service at the lowest cost but when it comes to manufacturing all of a sudden it's "we must protect jerbs".
Can they fix that web page? That was so awful to try to get any info.. Just scroll, scroll, scroll and still just a bunch of big pictures and no meaningful info.
If you look at the R1 pages, you'll see those pages, though scroll-heavy, at least contain more useful info. I'm hoping that after R2 is actually available to order, that they'll update the page with more information. It's still early.
This was half the reason I posted to HN, honestly. I've seen several recent examples of modern product pages which render awfully because they're trying to be "quirky".
Edit: look at this, scrolling an entire screen only to have a photo zoom by <1.25x: https://imgur.com/a/G2Hfe3Q
Boy it's ugly. While being a great fan of electric engines, I always wonder why electric cars by design must be ugly and have bad patterns (like retractable handles and a huge tablet in the middle)
I learned very early in my career that being in hardware/software/tech does NOT mean you will be around people that LIKE hardware/software/tech. Then I eventually joined a FAANG, assuming I finally found the nerds! Oof...extreme disappointment.
If we can have open standards to allow my car to interoperate with my home batteries (Franklin, Enphase, Tesla Powerwall or others), we'll all be better off.
Having driven a very slow acceleration car, yes, yes you do, trust me. Nothing worse than merging into dense traffic with high-speed trucks next to you and not being able to come up to speed before the ramp ceases.
Haptic steering wheel thumb-wheels instead of actual buttons? Hell no. Full pass. And we're in the market for a vehicle like this in the next year or so, looking hard at Santa Fe Calligraphy, or Outback XT (similar size, similar price tag, AFAICT). No physical buttons = no sale.
I think you’re confusing “haptic” for “capacitive”. The wheels are real, physical controls with motors to give tactile feedback about the state of the UI. You can literally feel where the beginning and end of a list are, for example. It’s even better than traditional buttons.
The only problem is that there aren’t also physical controls for media and climate, which there should be. But for everything else, the thumb wheels are going to be awesome.
The haptic feedback on e.g. macbook trackpads is very convincing, so I'm not sure it's impossible to get right in a car, but I wouldn't bet on <random car manufacturer> to get it right.
Former R1S Gen 2 owner. Love this brand and I want to love the car, but the quality and constant maintenance issues were unacceptable.
Rattles, a door mirror motor breaking, doors that wouldn't shut properly, door weather stripping that fell off, a door that just wouldn't open, panel alignment issues, some kind of screaching-to-a-halt-and-terrifying-my-family auto-brake that Rivian never figured out after reviewing log data.
Oh and did I mention the fans or heat pump that sound like a ROCKET LAUNCHING?! At a park one time someone asked me if something was wrong with the vehicle. Nope, that's just the terrible fans they chose!
Insult to injury: someone rear ended me. Insurance "covered" it, but the local collision center --- my only option within 6 hours --- charges a 2X rate for EVs that State Farm would not cover. So a $14,000 MINOR FENDER DENT turned into $7,000 out of pocket for me.
If you look at /r/rivian, it's a near constant stream of issues. While Rivian did expedite service center visits for critical issues, other times repairs were months out. And as the R2 scales, SC growth will probably trail for a while, and so I really fear for the experience early adopters are in for.
I am rooting for them but for me personally I would not consider another Rivian.
I really reality wish rivian create a better self-driving technology soon and make a proper competition to tesla. Rivian cars are so nice and well designed.
Personally I'm in no rush to have self-driving capabilities in my car for at least another decade or so. I'm pretty happy with the current ADAS systems found in most cars like adaptive cruise control, lane keeping, and collision avoidance - and happy to just see incremental refinements to those systems.
At some point I want a self-driving car, but I'm happy to let Waymo and Tesla users test those systems for another 10+ years before I personally start using them.
Of course everyone has different needs. This is the reason why there are so many different makers and models. I commute a lot (100 miles a day) and tesla self driving is hard requirement. But almost everything else in car sucks compared to other cars. And compared to rivian it sucks big time. The moment rivian gets what tesla have now with fsd I will switch immediately. And some comments suggest rivian is working on that.
The main thing I think about self-driving is if it truly were self-driving and you could sleep in the car while it drives to a destination overnight. Even if it were only highways. That would be really cool.
Are you buying a car in the next 10 years? I’m in a similar boat. But I’m irrelevant to the car market because I’m not buying until I can buy a Level 4 car.
I just bought a new car, and will probably buy another 1-2 cars in the next 10 years. My ideal upgrade path for cars is:
* I wanted my most recent purchase to be a PHEV
* I want my next purchase in roughly 5 years to be an EV (hopefully solid state batteries are available by then)
* In about 10 years I am hoping that I can buy a car that can self-drive most of my trips door-to-door
One thing I'll add is that I live in an area that gets a ton of snow, and current ADAS features are basically worthless in snow. They all turn off once the sensors get covered in ice, or when lines in the road are no longer visible. So I expect that even in new cars 10 years from now, I'll still need to take the wheel to drive during winter. Basically the features are nice when they work, but I'm still going to want to car that is first and foremost designed to be driven by humans.
> I live in an area that gets a ton of snow, and current ADAS features are basically worthless in snow
I live in Western Wyoming. While my Subaru won't drive itself in a blizzard, the radar is still useful.
My plan is to wait until I have something that can drive itself unsupervised in clear weather. Given that's Waymo today and maybe Tesla in ~5 years, I'm figuring something should be on the market that fits that bill within 10, which is how long I'll try to hold onto my gas-burnig Subaru.
They're working on that. They're partnering with Nvidia and the R2 will get upgraded hardware for self driving in the fall. I couldn't tell from the website if making a reservation now lets you wait for that.
Self-driving seems like something where car companies shouldn’t all “reinvent the wheel.” A couple of the bigger car companies have projects on this, right? Maybe they could share.
> A couple of the bigger car companies have projects on this, right? Maybe they could share
Why should they? We're already approaching geopolitical competition at this problem, given self-driving cars and self-driving self-propelled guns and the like are basically technological twins.
Honestly just decent smart cruise and lane keeping is good enough. Concentrate on making a solid long range reliable EV is the best way to compete with Tesla in the short to medium term.
No, sorry, I wouldn't buy EVs from any US company any more until they are matura enough that the model production surpasses at least Tesla Model S+X since released. Their reliability just suck. I don't want to waste my life again and again in those months-long waiting of service appointments, annoying issues every where and every day, hiring Lemon law lawyers and other BS.
I like the Rivians I've seen. They're actually, y'know, a truck as opposed to a k-hole hallucination. You can lift stuff up and over the bed near the cab.
"No CarPlay" is approximately where I stopped reading -- and I am literally their dream target audience - enough money to buy a second car, easily able to afford one of theirs, have solar on top of my house making my electricity cheap, like techy things.
They will either learn or ... not, I guess. I know I am not the only one. Nobody in my family would buy anything techy without my advice (and a modern EV is basically an iPad on wheels, so it qualifies as techy), and I will never ever give "yes" to a car without CarPlay
Length and width wise, it's smaller than a Model Y. It's deceptively styled to look a big boy car, but it's a matchbox. That's why no reviewers will show themselves or anyone else towering over it. It's for those who want a big car, but without all that space. Rivian calls it a mid-size SUV, but that is straight up bullshit.
If you want to see a reviewer next to it for scale, Doug DeMuro is 6'4" and has what you're looking for, from various angles over the course of the review. Looks like a reasonable size to me.
"Matchbox" is rather hyperbolic and would better match the upcoming R3/R3X which is around the size of a VW Golf (though that still isn't that small… Honda Fits, kei cars, and Fiat 500s are smaller still).
It's about a foot longer than my crossover, which is about the same size as a RAV4 or CR-V and there's no way I could call it tiny.
> It's deceptively styled to look a big boy car, but it's a matchbox. That's why no reviewers will show themselves or anyone else towering over it. It's for those who want a big car, but without all that space.
I miss the days when men looking to compensate would buy sports cars. It wasn't any less ridiculous, but at least they (edit: the cars) were better looking and more fun to drive.
If only those ridiculous guys who wanted something fun to drive had realized how much more fun they could have by making fun of people and feeling superior.
I guess it depends on what they were compensating for. Up until the 80's and 90's at least there was more association of racing cars with road cars that you could buy.
So that would associate you with the (A man's manly-man maybe?) driver of that car.
But now race cars are not really much like a production road car. And those older men with money don't necessarily want to be like the ever younger drivers being employed to win races.
As you say, ridiculous, but at least the sports cars were cool.
"straight up bullshit" would be calling a 4runner-sized vehicle a "matchbox". Really highlights how ridiculous American's unnecessary lust is for massive vehicles.
I wish Rivian would stop trying to emulate Tesla on this front and add support for CarPlay. I don't want your UI.
I actually like the look of the Rivian and this is something I'm somewhat in the market for (or will be in the next few years) but I won't touch it without CarPlay.
as a tesla owner, all I can tell, carPlay is ugly child was born due to EU car makers, not capable of building proper infotainment system.
I want to drive, not constantly connect/accept privacy etc. Especially if that is a $100k+ car.
When i get into the car, the last thing I'd like to know how my car is getting connected to my phone, if there are any issues, especially if that is not my car.
I love how my car knows that in the morning i go to work, and wednesday evening i go to yoga, and put GPS, with best traffic options. 0 touch, all super seamless. No phones involved.
CarPlay has become somewhat of a standard. It's fine to say you personally don't need it, but many/most laymen will still expect their new car to support it.
If a PC was launched without Windows support, most people on HN might be able to live with it day-to-day, but it would still be a dealbreaker for the general population. Admittedly this isn't a fair comparison, but hopefully you understand my point.
i have a rivian, and despite being a carplay fan before, i do not miss it. Carplay is a crutch for legacy autos who cant make software, so you just want to overlay a phone feed over their crap. But its very limited, its essentially a video overlay box and has terrible / non-existent integration with the cars smarts, like battery, range, HUD screens, advanced audio controls, etc etc. In my experience with carplay in other smart-ish cars (BMW X series) the carplay experience fights with the car OS constantly and is an awful incoherent experience.
A well made car software solution, like the rivians(mostly), is a better experience overall imho.
I say this as someone who still loves having carplay on my other car, a subaru, because their software is atrocious.
i would say, give one a try you might change your mind.
> the carplay experience fights with the car OS constantly and is an awful incoherent experience.
It seems to me like fixing this is the appropriate path forward. There are things that the car OS is better at (like you mention), but no car OS is ever going to support the various media apps I have on my phone that are automatically supported by Android/Android Auto media controls, and bluetooth playback is an even worse experience than cludging together the car OS + android auto media in one UI.
With FSD , that is a very very capable system in 2026, You need real multi media for driving (once it's solved), for camping , movies during charging, and not phone somehow ugly slapped by some plastic holder to your car.
I bought a new salad spinner recently, after having broken yet another one.
I’ve had fancy brands like Zyliss and OXO. I’ve had cheap store brand models and cheaper Amazon MYSSNGVWL type stuff as well. Knowing they would probably break didn’t make it feel better when they eventually broke.
Anyway the new salad spinner is large, heavy, with a steel pin into a brass bushing, has a metal handle and nylon gears in a sealed gearbox with exposed stainless screws for servicing. I opened it up and greased it on first use, mostly just to pretend to be servicing it, just to see what that felt like. It felt good!
The best part is it came with a catalogue that had order codes for spare parts. They wanted to help you maintain it. It was built to last and the manufacturer was on your side.
https://www.dynamicmixers.com/en/our-products/salad-spinner/...
I’m starting to feel silly writing all this about a salad spinner, but where is my car version of this?
The car version of this stopped being produced 15 years ago.
Old petrol Toyotas and Hondas met your criteria.
And the back catalogue of parts is huge and supported for a long time.
Modern cars aren't built as well.
Maybe the modern non-turbo petrol Mazdas are the best fallback.
The [Slate Truck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Truck) seems to be marketing itself with this in mind. But it's backed by Jeff Bezos, so proceed with caution.
This won’t fit the usual hate, but.. https://epc.tesla.com Vast majority of parts can be ordered directly from the catalogue.
How can you replace the idiotic console and door handles with manageable parts? Is there a sane charging port yet?
You want to add a load of buttons? Should be easy enough, just get them to send codes to the computer via the network.
Door handles are harder, what do you want to change? Inner or outer?
What's insane about the charging port?
Great, who can I contact to get this done?
> What's insane about the charging port?
Well it doesn't work with most charging stations. Maybe it's different in the US.
Don't they use the same IEC 62196 ports as other EVs, outside the US?
They made their own in the US, because the standard SAE J1772 combo port is an unweildy behemoth, then they released the patent into public domain, and the rest of the automotive industry adopted their port into the NACS port, which beats both IEC 62196 and SAE J1772 in available power, all in a much smaller and easier-to-use connector.
I’ve had a cheap (was $15) single salad spinner, for about 15 years. Decent amount of usage in that time, but not professional level.
So my question to you is: what the heck are you doing to your salad spinners?
If you spin low-grade uranium ore just right, the heavier particles will deposit on the edges, giving you high-grade uranium.
Please follow HN rules that forbid nuclear proliferation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Every car manufacturer has a catalog of spare parts you can order. I really don't understand what you're on about with your post.
That it should be possible for somebody with a reasonable understanding of car maintenance to actually fix or maintain their car instead of having a blob of proprietary nonsense only meant to lock you in and milk your wallet with mandatory dealer repairs and subscriptions.
https://www.worldpac.com/
Looks like a great car. As Marques Brownlee puts it [1], this is Rivian's "Model Y fighter". And I personally find the R2 to be much more appealing than a Model Y in terms of size, shape, and interior.
But we have been misled so many times about EV prices prior to launch, I think it's important to wait until we see what it actually costs for different trim levels before making comparisons to the Model Y. That $45,000 price they are throwing around could very well be for a trim that isn't even available at launch.
And anyway if I were going to buy a new compact crossover today, I'd probably lean more toward the RAV4 PHEV. It's an EV most of the time, I can refill it up with gas during long trips, it's got tactile buttons, and it has carplay.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfReqcUJfBU
None of these car reviewers ever take into account build quality and customer issues. Example they all lashihly praised the EX90, but owners struggled for a year with software problems, then found out the LIDAR they paid for is never going to assist their driving and they need a new computer. Same with Rivian, all of today's reviews praise the R2, but ignore the troubles current owners have not just with the car but with getting service too.
Never buy a first year model and then keep an eye on owners forums before you buy.
I would love to come in and buy a BYD with the exact same design flaws, but for 1/3 of the price. Sadly protectionism disallows me from doing that
One of the good things in the UK is seeing how quickly my neighbours swapped out their Tesla's for BYD's.
I'm not in the market at the moment so don't know what the UK protectionism position is on Chinese EV's, but has been interesting to watch how quick it's happening.
I work in design and we're talking to two Chinese EV companies launching in the UK this year, so the wall can't be that high for them.
The UK has a local car manufacturing industry (Nissan, Jaguar/Landrover), but not large enough to be able to lobby for protectionism. And in any case the UK has basically given up on having a coherent trade policy since Brexit.
I've seen quite a few BYDs and MG4s, and there are Jaecoo and Leapmotor dealers near me. I've been told that some NHS boards were using MGs as "pool" cars, but the only example I can find a reference for is Shetland. https://www.nhsshetland.scot/news/article/43/nhs-shetland-ro...
Imo its not anti-China protectionism. Western models are cheaper in China, and Chinese models are more expensive in the EU & UK.
I think it's a combination of manufacturers wanting a higher profit, some adaptations & certification processes, dealer and service infrastructure necessary for selling in the West that just costs more.
I don't think Chinese manufacturers will be able to significantly undercut the competition while maintaining a desirable quality
Same here! American-made EVs ask for an incredibly heavy price tag and don’t deliver on the reliability of ICE or Hybrid cars a third of their price. It’s the primary thing stopping me from getting one as my next vehicle.
I’m trying to shop around to replace my wife’s aging crossover and I really can’t find anything more attractive than a Prius or another Kia Soul. If we could get electric cars from the CN market it’d be a no-brainer!
I’ve had software issues on an ID4 and iX, but I’ve never had reliability problems. The cars always have just worked with no maintenance. Same with my model Y, minus any issues!
Maybe it’s a “but when it happens you’re screwed” situation. I’m thinking of the story of BMW’s battery safety fuse (the one that trips in an accident to protect first responders and the people in the car) actually tripping when you hot the curb or a pothole harder. It requires a very expensive trip to the dealer. Some of my Tesla owning friends keep spending time in the shop getting something about the suspension fixed 2-3 times already.
I have no idea if Chinese EVs are consistently better, Volvo can be seen as one and I don’t think they excel at reliability lately.
P.S. Software issues are reliability issues. The software is a core part of the car and its value proposition, you can’t discount them as “just software issues, not reliability”.
Underrated comment.
Everyone commented on the battery life for my model 3 in winter (which is annoying but not a huge deal). The problems with the bushings, the easily cracked (2500$) roof glass, and the lack of spare parts (not as bad as Rivian) were drowned out.
Love the car, but wouldn't have bought it for the price I paid (used) if I had known.
The R2 looks great but like you said, never buy a first year model.
(Unless it is the Honda 0 Saloon)
Day 1 reviews, the ones that drives sales of any product, are flawed by definition. They take a narrow and superficial view of the product, a snapshot when what you need is a timelapse.
The winter tires that score great on day 1 but put a bit of wear on them and they turn to crap. The motherboard that scores the highest in the benchmarks at launch but later on burns your CPU, or gets a BIOS update that caps the performance, or gets no updates whatsoever. The car that shines at acceleration and feature list but breaks down often and is slow and expensive to fix.
Day 1 reviews certainly have some value but it’s higher for the reviewer than for the potential buyer. By the time the reviewer follows up after battle testing in time, if they even want to risk looking like they got it wrong the first time, the damage was done. And people aren’t that interested in reading about old stuff, those reviews don’t get the views.
I watched one of those Out Of Spec videos on an earlier Rivian and it was full of praise and raving. Then there was a later video where they almost on the side mentioned when it came out of the factory it felt legitimately unsafe to drive on the highway and had already spent days at service including a total powertrain shutdown, essentially a lemon. These things happened already in the time before their first video yet were never mentioned. That entire YouTube review industry is more rotten and bought than the same show on Cable TV ever was..
I think Consumer Reports does large quality surveys of customers and includes that in their reviews.
Also Doug Demuro raves about it [1]. Personally I can't stand Marques' reviews. Just inspiring and he looks bored. Doug on the other hand really seems to put some of his soul into his reviews.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUl_0087dyM
Doug's format is beyond worn out and tiresome.
He hasn't innovated or improved upon anything in years.
Don't even get me started on his voice...
Right you are Ken, but the format pretty much is his schtick. It’s not that entertaining at all anymore, but it’s also decent to know that a review will probably exist for most cars I’m ever considering.
For me his value remains mainly that he’s tall which I am too, so when he’s in a car I can guess what it’ll be like for me.
I wanted to do something like that for motorcycles. Show how I fit on various bikes. I am 6'6" Knowing what to say is another matter though.
https://cycle-ergo.com/ here you go buddy, I'm on the taller side too and found this when choosing my last bike
If even Doug falls out of favor.. then I don't know anymore. His voice doesn't bother me too much but he sure has a lot of energy just to keep talking. Never stops talking.
what do you think about Mat Watson?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eepauvC5LU
The RAV4 EV capacity is so small, the electric engine so weak (cuts to gas well before highway speed), and the charge speed so slow, that in practice its a 100% gas car. Only a small number of disciplined owners are going to be able to run it as an EV most of the time, as its actually impractical to do so.
It’s a gas car, with greenwashing.
This is completely false. I own one. It goes up to the low 80s mph before the gas engine kicks in. Acceleration from a stop is sub 6 second 0-60. Hardly weak. Charges from fully empty to full in about 2.5 hours.
Mine gets a 40-45 mile all electric range. I drive 10-12k miles per year, and ignoring extended multi-day vacation road trips once every couple years, I fill up the tank 2-3 times per year.
My experience with my Prius PHEV is the same. I don’t even have a level 2 charger. I just plug it in in the garage overnight, and most days I don’t use any gas.
The only time the ICE turns on before my EV range is up is if I hit the windshield defrost button when it’s cold. That’s presumably to prioritize getting heat out through the vents quickly. I’ve never accelerated fast enough, nor gone fast enough to trigger the ICE engine taking over. It’s straight up an EV for my first ~40 miles every day.
> Mine gets a 40-45 mile all electric range.
That sounds like the real issue, vs. EVs. This sounds like you basically have to plug it in every time you park it. And there’s no way you could do any sort of (even small) road trip without using gas.
(For comparison, our EV6 has about 200-250 mile range, and we charge it about once a week or so, give or take, unless we take a road trip.)
Also, one of the main advantages with EVs is their insane low maintenance, but sounds like PHEVs still have to all the same maintenance issues of ICE vehicles.
> This sounds like you basically have to plug it in every time you park it. And there’s no way you could do any sort of (even small) road trip without using gas.
Yep, so people (mostly) don’t , in aggregate:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/16/plug-in-...
> Also, one of the main advantages with EVs is their insane low maintenance, but sounds like PHEVs still have to all the same maintenance issues of ICE vehicles.
I keep seeing this repeated, but I kept a detailed decade-plus spreadsheet of maintenace costs for my last ICE car, and ~2/3 of the costs were for components that are common to EVs.
1. Maintenance isn’t just about cost. It’s about the number of things that move and/or need fluids, and can fail/leak. It’s about dealing with service centers trying to upsell you on every little possible thing that could go wrong.
When I take my EV in, it’s for one of two things: I need my tires rotated, or I need new tires. That’s it. There’s no “curtsy inspection” that comes back with literally 40 different things that I could have done to it.
2. Our household has four vehicles: one EV, three ICE vehicles. There’s no way the occasional new tires (rotations are free where we bought our tires) amount to 2/3 the cost of the maintenance needed on our ICE vehicles. It’s probably closer to 1/10.
I think you’re overestimating what all needs maintenance on an EV.
> I think you’re overestimating what all needs maintenance on an EV.
I'm not doing any estimating, I kept a detailed spreadsheet of every dollar I put into the car, and am familiar with which items are common to an EV.
> and am familiar with which items are common to an EV.
This is the overestimating I was referring to. I think you’re either mistaken in what items are common to EV, or you’re overestimating the cost of those items.
There is only one thing that needs maintenance on an EV: tires.
Unless you’re saying that tires amount to 2/3 of an ICE vehicles maintenance. In which case you may want to shop around for more reasonably priced tires.
Not the person you replied to, but I'm not sure how you arrived here. Brakes, coolant, washer fluid, diff oil, gearbox oil, cabin air filter, wiper blades. Did you know EV motors can also require oil changes (at hundreds of thousands of miles, in fairness)?
Nice Michelins for my ICE have been something resembling 1/3 of service costs. Not 2/3 but not negligible either.
> Brakes
Maybe at 1/10 the schedule of ICE vehicles, at least for me. I use regenerative braking almost exclusively (probably 95+% of the time).
> coolant
Yes, I did forget about that one. But frequency is about 50% less often than ICE vehicles. Maybe once every 5-10 years.
> washer fluid, cabin air filter, wiper blades
Agreed on these as well, but I bucketed these in the trivial category, totaling less than a tank of gas once every 6-12 months, and all DIY things that you don’t need to take to a service center for.
At the end of the day, I only care about things I need to take it to the shop for. Which means I only need to take it in for a no-questions-asked tire rotation 1-2 times a year, and new tires every 4-5 years. Everything else I can easily do at home.
> diff oil, gearbox oil
These are the same thing, but you’re correct. But it’s infrequent (maybe once or twice over the life, and around $150.
> Did you know EV motors can also require oil changes
Ummm… what? Now you lost me. What EVs need oil?
> Maybe at 1/10 the schedule of ICE vehicles, at least for me. I use regenerative braking almost exclusively (probably 95+% of the time).
In practice, my brakes always corrode from road salt and fuel-efficient driving habits and need replacing long before I actually wear them down, so regen brakes are largely irrelevant to brake life.
> Which means I only need to take it in for a no-questions-asked tire rotation 1-2 times a year, and new tires every 4-5 years. Everything else I can easily do at home.
So that sounds... basically the same as my ICE. Two shop visits per year for tire changes, one oil change per year at the same time as one of the tire changes.
There are many things that break or need maintenance on my ICE vehicles that I don’t want to mess with myself: oil changes, transmissions, alternators, belts, engine issue (oil leaks). Engine air filters are about the only ICE-specific piece I don’t mind doing myself.
Re: brakes, where I live, I don’t think salt will play much a factor, and not sure what you mean by “fuel efficient driving” wearing your brakes, but I’m using regenerative braking 95+% of the time.
> Did you know EV motors can also require oil changes
Please enjoy an excellent podcast I quite like: https://youtu.be/YvE164Ubgss?t=900 (wait for 15:45)
Again, probably only relevant for extremely long term ownership, but someone will need to own and maintain all the high mileage decade-old EVs a decade from now.
ICE maintenance is pretty cheap, with the exception of tires, which are a huge outlay (but also the most important safety item!). My Honda only needs $35 of oil/filter once a year, maybe $40 of brake pads once in 80,000 miles, and a burned out bulb for a few bucks. Top tires all around though, easily $600-$800. A few one time things around the 100k mile mark, maybe plugs/sparkys/belt or similar, but not regular in any sense, most cars will only have them ever done once.
You can see my post from a few months ago where I list all the non-ICE-specific maintenance costs from my spreadsheet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45629438
> seatbelt receptacle, a cruise control buttons, roof exterior rubber trim, a headrest, a window switch, washer fluid spray nozzles, lug nuts, wiper blades, shocks, struts, door weather stripping, rivets holding the front plastic splashguard on, headlight bulbs, headlight buffing, washer fluid reservoir cap, replacement speaker, turn signal switch, windshield repair, backup light switch.
Other than washer fluid, wiper blades, and the occasional headlight bulb, many of these I’ve never had to replace on any of my vehicles (ICE or EV), and the few that I’ve had to replace was maybe once on one car.
I feel like you’re an unlucky sample of 1.
Most of my ICE vehicles needed none of these, and only things related to ICE vehicles (oil/fluid changes, brake pads/rotors oil leaks, transmissions, alternators, belts).
I think you also might be overestimating what the average ICE owner has to take care of.
Most Americans don’t keep a car long enough to even pay it off - they’re in an endless loop of trade-ins, meaning that most non-accident damage is covered by warranty.
I’ve had my current ICE car for just over 5 years now and finally paid my first out of pocket repair cost: $40 for a new washable air filter. Other than that, my expenditures have been tires and a couple hundred bucks in oil changes that I didn’t want to do myself.
> I think you also might be overestimating what the average ICE owner has to take care of.
> Most Americans don’t keep a car long enough to even pay it off - they’re in an endless loop of trade-ins, meaning that most non-accident damage is covered by warranty.
No, I think you may be underestimating. According to this article [1] at least, it’s close to 13 years. That’s well into large/costly maintenance items.
Maybe on HN, people don’t keep their cars long enough to need new brakes or transmission flush, but that’s not typical.
[1] https://www.spglobal.com/automotive-insights/en/blogs/2025/0...
> I’ve had my current ICE car for just over 5 years now and finally paid my first out of pocket repair cost: $40 for a new washable air filter.
Repairs are only a subset of maintenance. Maintenance includes oil changes, brakes, transmission flushes, etc.
All of this is part of the maintenance that ICE vehicles need that EVs don’t.
Vehicle age != ownership duration. The used car market is thriving and aftermarket warranties are a huge part of this.
I also clearly mentioned maintenance in my post - you chose to quote the sentence before it, leaving it out and then respond as if I hadn’t.
Please don’t engage me with this kind of dishonest conversation. It’s a waste of both our time.
Curious for the big examples. Some major things EVs don’t have: oil changes, belts/chains, transmissions, most things related to the engine & drive train are different… seems like the main similarities would be tires, brakes, body work, amenities.
No the GP, but in the 10 years of owning my ICE vehicle I've had these things serviced:
Oil change/Oil filter, Spark plugs, Alternator belt, Aircon belt, Brake pads, Brake fluid, Wiper blades, Wiper fluid, 12V battery, Tyres, an accessory fuse, a jammed seatbelt buckle. Two of the power locks are a bit sticky and probably need a touch-up of oil.
The first 4 are ICE-only, and brake pads are worn less if you mostly use regen. The rest are the same on EVs.
And by far the biggest cost of car ownership (for new cars at least) is depreciation. And EVs depreciate rapidly - enough to offset the costs of oil changes I imagine. And I actually like bringing my car into the dealer twice a year for service. I get to wander around and check out what's new, eat some free snacks, shoot the breeze with my dealer about what's happening in the industry, and then spend the rest of the time on my laptop. Maybe this is sad to admit, but I actually kind of look forward to it.
That being said, if you're in the market for a used EV right now, that depreciation actually works in your favor. I was looking at prices on used luxury EVs recently, and have to admit I was pretty tempted by some 2-3 year old cars selling at less than half MSRP.
That is the point of a PHEV. Just enough battery to cover the daily commute. Plug it in each night, and M-F you could use zero gas.
Toyotas hybrid uses gas when you accelerate hard to get that 0-60, it’s a combined system horsepower. Unlike phevs, EREVs are only driven by the electric drive, and the gas system is a series generator, so the EV is fully capable & always doing 100% of the work. PHEVs fundamentally aren’t.
Anyway, the real world data from PHEV usage shows you are the outlier, most people don’t bother plugging them in regularly due to their limitations.
Again, false. You can clearly hear when the combustion engine kicks in and it's indicated in the dash. I can floor it in electric mode and it still gets up to 60 in around 6 seconds, no gas involved. Hybrid mode is probably slightly faster but it's a very marginal difference.
I don't believe your last statement because you've been wrong about everything else, and it doesn't make sense. Plugging it in is exactly as easy as literally any electric car, and it simply doesn't have the limitations you claim it does.
I don't know what you've been reading, but you should evaluate the veracity of it as a source and talk to actual owners. I know several others who have one and we're all quite happy with them and don't get gas often
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/16/plug-in-...
“ The researchers attributed most of the gap to overestimates of the “utility factor” – the ratio of miles travelled in electric mode to the total miles travelled – finding that 27% of driving was done in electric mode even though official estimates assumed 84%. ”
Perhaps the rav4 prime @ 41ml max ev range is a better system than all the other low range PHEVs like it, and has better real world usage data than them. I doubt it though, but I don’t have the data on just the rav.
_If used correctly_, they're pretty good. Most people don't use them correctly.
0 mention of rav4 in this article which seems to be about European cars.
European registered cars. The RAV4 PHEV is a popular car in Europe so is assuredly well represented in this data set of 800,000 phevs.
It's an interesting article - thanks for sharing! The original report is worth reading too. [1]
I agree with the premise. The "utility factor" used to estimate fuel efficiency for PHEVs does not line up with real-world data, which effectively creates a loophole to avoid emissions regulations and keep selling gas guzzlers. This is a problem, and should be fixed.
In regards to which cars are most to blame:
> Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and BMW account for the lion’s share of fines avoided over the past three years, together responsible for 89% of the total.
This is a recent trend where luxury carmakers are using PHEVs to circumvent emissions regulations. The latest BMW M5 [2], for example, is a PHEV with a monster 4.4L V8 engine. Car enthusiasts actually hate it compared to the old model because the hybrid system increased the weight by 1000 lbs. But making it a PHEV is probably the only way that BMW is still able to sell a V8. It seems kind of stupid all around.
The RAV4 PHEV is also a big, heavy (4,500 lb) car with a large (by European standards) 2.5L engine. But I would hesitate to lump it in with luxury cars from BMW, Mercedes, Land Rover, etc. I would also hesitate to apply findings from a European study to the US market, where large gasoline cars are currently very popular (not that every discussion needs to be about the US - but the RAV4 is the best selling car in the US so it's important to that market). Not saying you're wrong about RAV4 PHEV emissions relative to the gasoline RAV4, just that the study you linked doesn't really support making any specific claims about that model. The report only mentions Toyota once, where it is lumped into an "others" category on a chart along with Ford, Hyundai, JLR, Kia, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, and Suzuki.
[1] https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/smoke-screen-t...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4Q_dlfQFyg
So if you are too lazy to plug it in every night or your day to day driving exceeds the battery range you shouldn't buy one.
One of my neighbours has one but nowhere to plug it in. I have no idea why they bought it.
This wouldn't stop me from buying one.
There are reasons to buy a PHEV even if you never plug it in. Their electric motors tend to output more power than HEV versions of the same model, leading to more performance and a quieter drivetrain (even with the engine running, it doesn't have to work as hard). You can also run climate control and infotainment while parked without having to idle the engine, which is nice when waiting around on a hot day. Or you can remotely start the air conditioner with your phone.
Basically you can get EV quality-of-life features on a gasoline-powered vehicle.
I probably wouldn't recommend a PHEV to someone who doesn't have a place to plug it in every day. But there are reasons to buy a PHEV beyond just fuel efficiency.
Not everyone is rich enough to live in a private house, where one could plug EVs daily.
What limitations stop someone from plugging them in regularly? If you have a charger at home, what stops people from plugging them in at night?
And who cares if this guy is the outlier? You're going to bash on the car because people are dumb and don't know how to operate their cars?
The cars fine. It’s great it works for him. I wouldn’t personally buy one today when lots of options for real BEVs exist, but you do you.
What I do care about, and why I care that he’s an outlier, is that low range PHEVs mainly exist to get emissions credits for manufacturers so that they can sell more gas cars, and those emission savings aren’t real [1]. You could say everyone’s dumb for using them this way, but clearly the ergonomics of the electrical capabilities in this category are lacking in important ways.
And I can’t prove it but I bet the manufacturers have known this for a long time. But adding a plug to a hybrid with a tiny battery was an awfully cheap way to get your existing car counted as “green” for credits, so too tempting.
(1) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/16/plug-in-...
I watched MKBHD’s review versus Doug DeMuro’s and only one of them took the time to point out the tailgate window and wipers. One reviews cars the other reviews gadgets.
I watched both Marques' review and Doug's, and yeah Doug's was better. I linked the MKBHD review because mainly I wanted to make the Model Y comparison, and Marques called it a "Model Y fighter" in the video title.
And also, Doug feels a little out of touch to me these days. Less about "quirks and features" that appeal to me (although he still covers that), and more about "enthusiast cars" (like his million dollar Porsche and Lambo) that don't really interest me. Although to be fair MKBHD isn't much better in that regard.
The only thing I'd miss about the MY is the 7-seat feature. I love the fact that you can technically cram two more people in the car on the occasional times when you need to, without needing to drive a giant 7-seat boat. I wish more mid-size electric SUVs did the same.
I sat in the back seat of a model Y with two other adults and it was extremely painful.
That's not surprising. The point isn't to use it to regularly drive tall adults around back there. It's for when your family of four needs to take two of your kids' friends somewhere, that kind of thing. We probably use it once every couple of months, but it's super handy at those times, and folds away out of sight and mind the rest of the time.
The RAV4 Prime is extremely hard to get if you live outside of SoCal and maybe a few other areas. I'm in the southeast and a few years ago the local dealer told me that this entire region is only allocated a few Prime's each quarter. Even today I've never seen one in the wild.
Not only that, but it sounds like dealerships are still hardcore ripping off people who want to buy a RAV4 Prime. $20k over MSRP, refusing to sell without add-ons / warranty, etc.
Yep, wanted one but it made zero sense at the prices they wanted. Got a fully electric EV and very happy with the choice.
I figure there's a lot more to break on the Prime too.
The 23-25 RAV4 prime has a recall where the instrument cluster goes blank. AFAIK the whole thing needs to be replaced. Sounds just like the Ioniq ICCU issues.
Marques Brownlee is a kid who did shitty reviews of cell phones and is now a tech influencer, not an objective auto industry reviewer. He knows jack shit about the auto industry. Whatever comes out of his mouth is designed to make his clients - the companies who pay him to pimp their products - look as good as possible.
Rivians are wildly heavy and inefficient compared to the rest of the industry. The R1T weighs more than two of the heaviest version of the Ioniq 5, for example.
R1T owners seem to average about 2mi/kwhr, whereas the Ioniq 5 gets almost twice that...
Its fitting he would think the reference in EVs is the Model Y of all things, the technologically outdated, slow charging car whose sales are falling off a cliff while the manufacturer is trying to upsell you a monthly subscription for lane keeping.
here another review from my favorite car reviewer Mat Watson (carwow), from what I remember he complains about cleaning rear window wiper, but it feels all in all like paid ad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eepauvC5LU
> It's an EV most of the time
Nowhere on the Toyota site did I see anything about range on battery only. Still, I wouldn't mind having one.
I settled for a refurbed Leaf and have only needed an ICE vehicle twice, because of cargo capacity, not range.
Toyota is claiming "up to 52 miles on a full charge" on the recently announced 2026 RAV4 PHEV [1]. For me that would be enough to cover the majority of my trips.
Looks like I was mistaken though and you can't actually buy the 2026 model yet (and the Toyota website still shows the older 2025 model). And as another commenter pointed out, it may not actually be possible to buy the older model either due to insufficient production.
[1] https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a69059379/2026-toyota-r...
A friend of mine bought one. It ended up being kind of awful. 53mi of range for a 40kwH battery? That's abysmal. Where's all the power going?
He traded it in for a used 2023 Model Y. Does 9-hr road trips all the time. I don't think he's going back.
The R2 was the first time I seriously thought about spending up on a vehicle.
It looks good.
But $45k++ is just wild to me. It seems like the market is undervaluing used EV’s, so hopefully the depreciation curve will bring these down to $30k in a couple years for us old-school folks who prefer not to have a $1000/mo car loan.
I'm a little confused why you think that's wild; It's pricing is inline with other BEV's in the Canadian market at least; it's comparing with the Model Y, the Equinox, the Blazer, the Mach e, the Ioniq 5, the EV6, the BZ4, and the Aryia.
Typically speaking you're going to spend $10,000 to $13,000 more then an equivalent gas car for a BEV vs a comparable gas car in Canada.
> But $45k++ is just wild to me
It’s just surprising to me that this is surprising to anyone in 2026. New cars are no longer $20-30k in the US and haven’t been since 2021. Average transaction price is now $50k+, so if companies like Rivian that skip the dealership model charge $45k, it really isn’t that expensive. The only new cars under $30k are sedans and hatchbacks. And most of them start at almost $27-30k for base price not including all the bs dealership fees.
The 45k is a myth for now. The vehicles that have been reviewed so far are going to be $60k+ performance models. We'll see if they actually get down to 45k.
From the analysis I've seen with that drag coefficient, the 45k vehicle is going to have to have a range of 220 to 260 miles. Hardly something that will fly off the shelves.
Small, efficient gasoline vehicles are prohibited by CAFE standards in the US, but EVs are exempt. Generally new EV manufacturers have been starting with high-end vehicles, and working their way into mid-range, with hopes on eventual low-range vehicles.
Because EVs are exempt from CAFE standards, it does open up a niche at the very low end, and Slate and Telo are starting up production in that market, so one of their vehicles might appeal to you.
ya same, i can't see spending as much as i did on my first tesla 5+ years ago, the depreciations just too steep, hopefully that holds for rivian too and i'll pick one up in a couple years the R2 is really nice.
That said, china BEV's are 1/2 the cost even accounting for import costs to the USA lol so sort of points toward a issue with US companies at the moment
Do they depreciate any worse than their gas counterparts? You’re also saving money on gas and maintenance - that’s gotta count for something, no?
In California with PG&E which most people have, no you don't save much. It's different if you can charge for free at work.
And yes EVs depreciated worse than any other vehicle.
> In California with PG&E which most people have,
Most people in California don’t have PG&E. Most of the land area in the northern 2/3 of the State or so is covered by PG&E, but people and land area aren't the same thing. Southern California Edison alone serves almost as many people as PG&E, and other smaller utilities, including public utilities like LADWP, SMUD, Silicon Valley Power, etc., serve another big chunk of the population.
You can get a used EV for pretty cheap these days
Average price of a new vehicle in the US is $50,000. This is priced appropriately considering total cost of ownership delta against a combustion vehicle. Rivian needs more volume for prices to decline from manufacturing efficiency at scale.
https://www.axios.com/2024/12/19/cars-prices-inflation-suvs
A cursory search of the web shows that TCO for EVs in the US is higher than ICE for all but high mileage commuters. Wish it wasn't the case, but insurance alone is a 30% premium.
Model 3 TCO is very competitive for all sedans. But yes, there are a lot of luxury EVs and EVs with questionable reliability.
https://www.self.inc/info/expensive-cars-to-run/
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-maintenance/the-cos...
Insurance is a bear for Teslas. They cost a lot to repair.
The Model 3 Highland is super fun to drive. Maybe other EVs have this too. It's a very different experience to a similarly priced ICE car, and worth factoring in to the value proposition.
I specify Highland because the previous version was rattly and noisy enough to seriously detract from the zippy driving experience. Highland is nice.
NYT recently did a fantastic calculator. It isn't simple flat one or the other is cheaper. It takes into account buy vs lease, milage, local energy cost, length of ownership etc
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/upshot/ev-vs-gas-ca...
https://www.atlasevhub.com/weekly-digest/new-2025-update-on-...
Are you sure about that? The cost of repairing even minor collision damage on a Rivian is ridiculous.
Yup, R1S dented rear quarter, $55000 to repair, insurance totaled it out...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Rivian/comments/1r19jxb/vivian_is_o...
There are multiple other people in the comments saying they had quarter panels repaired for $15K. Which is still a lot, but it’s not $55K.
There’s definitely more to that story.
I'd love to see the itemized bill.
How are insurers making any money insuring these things nowadays? 30% higher premiums are being mentioned elsewhere in the comments; that doesn't sound like enough!
>How are insurers making any money insuring these things nowadays?
Because insurance is fundamentally a "skim some" model.
They have a massive pool of money. Sure the pool is bleeding all the time because they're paying out, but it's also being replenished by premiums paid in. They invest this "constant" pool of money and the return on this covers overhead plus profit.
So when we're all getting screwed on our premiums because fenders cost tens of thousands and Karens file claims for parking scratches they're making more money, because the same ROI on a bigger pool of money is a bigger number.
People keep repeating this uncritically. There is a car-debt crisis, and wages haven't kept up with house/car costs.
We have one person saying "well in Californian wages..." and another saying essentially that 50K isn't a lot of money when the average SALARY is $66K/year.
I also believe this $50,000 stat is the mean car price which is likely to be pushed up by luxury car sales that cost 2-4x what a typical car costs, whereas a median price would give a better indication of what most people are actually spending. I did a quick Google search and wasn't able to find any data on median price, though.
I wonder how much of this ridiculous car money was previously buy-a-house money. If you don't think you'll ever buy a house, you might as well spend it on a car.
> There is a car-debt crisis
To what degree is this caused by car prices versus Americans' compulsion to keep buying new cars? Anecdotally, the folks I know struggling with car payments are almost exclusively in the latter bucket. But I'm open to having my mind changed with data.
If people didn't buy new cars there would never be used cars.
Tell that to Cuba.
Not entirely true; there are at least the lease, rental, and commercial fleet markets supplying predictable inventory of used cars to the public market.
I have 2014 Tesla S which which I recently had drive unit and battery replaced ($20k total). my friends all think I am nuts, but they all have $1k+ payments (some for 72m) while I haven’t had a car payment since 2017 and won’t have another one till 2036 :)
If your friends dumped $20K into paying off those loans they’d be a lot closer to paid off or maybe paid off completely, though. And that’s on a newer, lower mileage car.
I’m all for maintaining vehicles and keeping them on the road, but I don’t think you’re in a place to criticize your friends with $1K car payments after putting almost 2 years worth of those payments into a car that’s over a decade old.
What are you thinking about getting next?
Who paid the $20k?
How many miles?
As a European: nice, but why is it so BIG? How is that monster called "mid-size"? Why would one want to haul so many tons of extra metal around just to transport one's behind?
As a European (dutch), why are our roads so small, that normal sized cars look like "monsters". I have often thought, that Europe will have a problem in the future with roads, as they are just too small, and expanding and making them more safe, is unlikely to ever happen and often times impossible. Not everyone can get by with a small little hatchback, some of us need a big pickup (I own a building company). And for the people that do not need it from a commercial point of view, have you ever considered that people have hobbies and some hobbies needs a fair amount of space in a car? Or families with multiple kids doing sport need the space for all the gear? I am worried that in the future, more and more european cities will just address the problem with a disguised "we are making the cities car free, and thus greener and safer". What that means for the average citizen out there is, that any building related work, will just become more expensive, as people will just charge more to get over the hassle of getting into the cities then.
I'm glad the roads are small. Smaller roads cause slower driving (well researched). As for the cities, it is unsustainable to use cars as the primary mode of transportation within cities. We do want to make cities greener and largely car-free, because cars for individuals simply do not make any sense in a city. We still need roads for deliveries and occasional transportation of heavy or large goods, but transporting yourself within a city should rarely be done in a car. See Tokyo for an example of a large metropolis which functions well and which would completely break down if everybody tried to use a car to get somewhere.
an families with multiple kids? They should do what? Come now.
What I've observed, is that 90% of journeys people make can be done without a car.
Designing a city that helps people make those journeys car free, makes it better for the 10% of journeys that do need to be made with a car.
Can and want to or being efficient are different things. I "can" travel around in a city using public transport with 3 kids and all their sporting equipment, do I want to, no. Would any sane person want to? No.
Maybe consider a sports club that's in walking -- or cycling -- distance. But I guess that's also insane.
Unless you're going surfing, 3 kids and their sporting equipment fit in a small hatchback, with room to spare.
see, this is the narrow minded view of so many europeans. Well just go to a closer sports club....is not an answer to the problem that thousands of people experience with small cars, and small roads.
As a European, I’ve been gently looking forward to Rivian’s R3 for years now. I like the design and it looks much more like a machine that will suit Europe.
>As a European: nice, but why is it so BIG? How is that monster called "mid-size"?
Because it's a nominal size more than a descriptive one. Midsize is the second biggest size with only "full size" stuff being bigger.
It made more sense 30-40yr ago when people who remembered when the domestic auto makers mostly only made a full-size, a midsize and a compact car were still alive and of prime car buying age.
when every car around you is even bigger than this, you’ll appreciate not driving a minuscule car in america.
it is terrifying
Put some physical buttons in there and maybe I’ll consider it.
I want Rivian to succeed, more competition is a good thing, but reading about the all the buy backs on r/rivian is disheartening.
Tip: do not get Rivian unless a service center is close.
I think insiders would tell you off the record not to get an R1, but that the R2s should be much more robust. Of course it's untested at this point, but hopefully that's the case.
I feel quite bad for people living in the United States. Despite the constant refrain about freedom y'all are actually pretty hindered when it comes to reasonably priced EVs. On Saturday I put a down on a BYD Shark 6 truck. Hopefully I'll collect it Friday, if not early next week. I'm paying $41,200 USD for the thing brand new. I saw a MotorTrend review of it last week, they flew down to Mexico City to test one out. The entry level pricing there is $50,060 USD. Here in Australia they're called the "Raptor Killer" as they will take Ford Ranger Raptors off the line and cost a bit more than half the price of the Raptor.
A BYD Shark 6 is not an EV?
Yeah, I didn’t realize we were calling hybrids “EV”s now.
Also, the BYDs I’ve been in were chintzy garbage as far as fit and finish goes. Can’t speak to their reliability, or other aspects of them, though.
If it's going to have a gasoline engine anyway, I'd much rather just get the Raptor. By the way, the Ford Ranger Raptor is not to be confused with the Ford F-150 Raptor which is a total beast.
It's funny that the software engineers on this forum are all obsessed with building scalable systems that can provide a service at the lowest cost but when it comes to manufacturing all of a sudden it's "we must protect jerbs".
It's about time people woke up to the fact China is not just after jerbs.
This carried more weight when the US wasn't trying to take Greenland.
Can they fix that web page? That was so awful to try to get any info.. Just scroll, scroll, scroll and still just a bunch of big pictures and no meaningful info.
If you look at the R1 pages, you'll see those pages, though scroll-heavy, at least contain more useful info. I'm hoping that after R2 is actually available to order, that they'll update the page with more information. It's still early.
The scrolling was so bad I had to close the page when I was actually interested.
This was half the reason I posted to HN, honestly. I've seen several recent examples of modern product pages which render awfully because they're trying to be "quirky".
Edit: look at this, scrolling an entire screen only to have a photo zoom by <1.25x: https://imgur.com/a/G2Hfe3Q
Boy it's ugly. While being a great fan of electric engines, I always wonder why electric cars by design must be ugly and have bad patterns (like retractable handles and a huge tablet in the middle)
HNers so grumpy you’d think this was an AI story submission…
I learned very early in my career that being in hardware/software/tech does NOT mean you will be around people that LIKE hardware/software/tech. Then I eventually joined a FAANG, assuming I finally found the nerds! Oof...extreme disappointment.
Anyone have insights on V2G or V2H capabilities?
If we can have open standards to allow my car to interoperate with my home batteries (Franklin, Enphase, Tesla Powerwall or others), we'll all be better off.
I saw on one of the review videos that you can get 2400W out of the R2
At 240v? Or thru a regular plug somehow?
Charger to load adapter.
Do you really need a 0-60mph time of 3.0 seconds in a mommymobile?
How much of that performance comes for free, from optimizing for range/efficiency?
What's the obvious "that could be less" in the system that wouldn't negatively impact efficiency?
Having driven a very slow acceleration car, yes, yes you do, trust me. Nothing worse than merging into dense traffic with high-speed trucks next to you and not being able to come up to speed before the ramp ceases.
BYD's electric SUV is currently available here in Australia for the local equivalent of $40,000.
Selling well like all BYD models.
Cheaper models like the Atto are the equivalent of $20,000.
Haptic steering wheel thumb-wheels instead of actual buttons? Hell no. Full pass. And we're in the market for a vehicle like this in the next year or so, looking hard at Santa Fe Calligraphy, or Outback XT (similar size, similar price tag, AFAICT). No physical buttons = no sale.
I think you’re confusing “haptic” for “capacitive”. The wheels are real, physical controls with motors to give tactile feedback about the state of the UI. You can literally feel where the beginning and end of a list are, for example. It’s even better than traditional buttons.
The only problem is that there aren’t also physical controls for media and climate, which there should be. But for everything else, the thumb wheels are going to be awesome.
Marques Brownlee seems to like the wheels in his latest video review, FWIW.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfReqcUJfBU
And unsafe electronic door handles so your kids an unable to get out of the car in an emergency. https://old.reddit.com/r/Rivian/comments/1r1etyr/zack_demons...
That video makes it look like a physical button for the rear door manual release (albeit in a very hidden location)?
The haptic feedback on e.g. macbook trackpads is very convincing, so I'm not sure it's impossible to get right in a car, but I wouldn't bet on <random car manufacturer> to get it right.
The Outback is an incredible car for the money
My BYD Sealion 7 has been an absolute joy.
Car manufacturer websites are one of the worst things on the web.
Why do they think we want to look at snail-paced scrolling, stuttery animations?
Former R1S Gen 2 owner. Love this brand and I want to love the car, but the quality and constant maintenance issues were unacceptable.
Rattles, a door mirror motor breaking, doors that wouldn't shut properly, door weather stripping that fell off, a door that just wouldn't open, panel alignment issues, some kind of screaching-to-a-halt-and-terrifying-my-family auto-brake that Rivian never figured out after reviewing log data.
Oh and did I mention the fans or heat pump that sound like a ROCKET LAUNCHING?! At a park one time someone asked me if something was wrong with the vehicle. Nope, that's just the terrible fans they chose!
Insult to injury: someone rear ended me. Insurance "covered" it, but the local collision center --- my only option within 6 hours --- charges a 2X rate for EVs that State Farm would not cover. So a $14,000 MINOR FENDER DENT turned into $7,000 out of pocket for me.
If you look at /r/rivian, it's a near constant stream of issues. While Rivian did expedite service center visits for critical issues, other times repairs were months out. And as the R2 scales, SC growth will probably trail for a while, and so I really fear for the experience early adopters are in for.
I am rooting for them but for me personally I would not consider another Rivian.
Deadly door handles, all around ugly. Why?
I really reality wish rivian create a better self-driving technology soon and make a proper competition to tesla. Rivian cars are so nice and well designed.
Personally I'm in no rush to have self-driving capabilities in my car for at least another decade or so. I'm pretty happy with the current ADAS systems found in most cars like adaptive cruise control, lane keeping, and collision avoidance - and happy to just see incremental refinements to those systems.
At some point I want a self-driving car, but I'm happy to let Waymo and Tesla users test those systems for another 10+ years before I personally start using them.
Of course everyone has different needs. This is the reason why there are so many different makers and models. I commute a lot (100 miles a day) and tesla self driving is hard requirement. But almost everything else in car sucks compared to other cars. And compared to rivian it sucks big time. The moment rivian gets what tesla have now with fsd I will switch immediately. And some comments suggest rivian is working on that.
The main thing I think about self-driving is if it truly were self-driving and you could sleep in the car while it drives to a destination overnight. Even if it were only highways. That would be really cool.
I can't sleep in a moving car anyway so that's of no value to me. If I'm going to be awake anyway then I might as well drive.
You mean like a bus?
Are you buying a car in the next 10 years? I’m in a similar boat. But I’m irrelevant to the car market because I’m not buying until I can buy a Level 4 car.
I just bought a new car, and will probably buy another 1-2 cars in the next 10 years. My ideal upgrade path for cars is:
* I wanted my most recent purchase to be a PHEV
* I want my next purchase in roughly 5 years to be an EV (hopefully solid state batteries are available by then)
* In about 10 years I am hoping that I can buy a car that can self-drive most of my trips door-to-door
One thing I'll add is that I live in an area that gets a ton of snow, and current ADAS features are basically worthless in snow. They all turn off once the sensors get covered in ice, or when lines in the road are no longer visible. So I expect that even in new cars 10 years from now, I'll still need to take the wheel to drive during winter. Basically the features are nice when they work, but I'm still going to want to car that is first and foremost designed to be driven by humans.
> I live in an area that gets a ton of snow, and current ADAS features are basically worthless in snow
I live in Western Wyoming. While my Subaru won't drive itself in a blizzard, the radar is still useful.
My plan is to wait until I have something that can drive itself unsupervised in clear weather. Given that's Waymo today and maybe Tesla in ~5 years, I'm figuring something should be on the market that fits that bill within 10, which is how long I'll try to hold onto my gas-burnig Subaru.
What radar? I'm pretty sure that Subaru uses only cameras, no radar.
https://www.subaru.com/eyesight.html
Agreed! But I have to say, lane centering and adaptive cruise control have been amazing, coming from a previous vehicle with neither.
They're working on that. They're partnering with Nvidia and the R2 will get upgraded hardware for self driving in the fall. I couldn't tell from the website if making a reservation now lets you wait for that.
Self-driving seems like something where car companies shouldn’t all “reinvent the wheel.” A couple of the bigger car companies have projects on this, right? Maybe they could share.
It will probably follow the same pattern as ADAS. Bosch or someone will develop a package, sell it to car manufacturers, and it will become widespread
Why aren't car manufacturers partnering with Comma when they're the closest competitor to Tesla's system? The Bosch systems are super basic.
> A couple of the bigger car companies have projects on this, right? Maybe they could share
Why should they? We're already approaching geopolitical competition at this problem, given self-driving cars and self-driving self-propelled guns and the like are basically technological twins.
Honestly just decent smart cruise and lane keeping is good enough. Concentrate on making a solid long range reliable EV is the best way to compete with Tesla in the short to medium term.
See also:
https://insideevs.com/reviews/786814/rivian-r2-prototype-fir...
https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/first-drive-2026-rivian-r...
R1S looks better than R2
I prefer Lucid Air ~ https://youtu.be/JxuB4H6uCq8
No, sorry, I wouldn't buy EVs from any US company any more until they are matura enough that the model production surpasses at least Tesla Model S+X since released. Their reliability just suck. I don't want to waste my life again and again in those months-long waiting of service appointments, annoying issues every where and every day, hiring Lemon law lawyers and other BS.
Data points:
- one Model X
- one R1s
- My neighbor: one Model X, one R1t
- My collegemate: one Model X
I'm tired of EVs using the electric usage to gut their interiors of $50k+ cars.
deadly door handles, no thanks
It’s really hard to judge the size of the R2. It looks like I’m looking at an updated R1S.
Is this thing crossover sized like a Kia Soul or a Rav4? Or is it bigger?
R2's dimensions are 185.6" x 75" x 66.9". The 2026 RAV4 is 181" x 73" x 66.5". So the R2 is slightly bigger than a RAV4.
The R1S is significantly larger at 200" x 82" x 77.3".
No CarPlay,UI with toxic translucent floating buttons, "evolving" steering wheel.
Have they learned nothing?
I like the Rivians I've seen. They're actually, y'know, a truck as opposed to a k-hole hallucination. You can lift stuff up and over the bed near the cab.
The R1 is a body on frame, so a traditional truck chassis.
This new R2 is a unibody- so more of a car, less so a truck
I'd rather have a slate.
Or perhaps even two Slates for the price of a high end R2
https://www.slate.auto
That 300+ miles means nothing without more specs. What’s the size of the battery? The usual 130-140 kWh?
In addition, that's presumably not on the base model price point. Will be interesting to find out.
"No CarPlay" is approximately where I stopped reading -- and I am literally their dream target audience - enough money to buy a second car, easily able to afford one of theirs, have solar on top of my house making my electricity cheap, like techy things.
They will either learn or ... not, I guess. I know I am not the only one. Nobody in my family would buy anything techy without my advice (and a modern EV is basically an iPad on wheels, so it qualifies as techy), and I will never ever give "yes" to a car without CarPlay
Length and width wise, it's smaller than a Model Y. It's deceptively styled to look a big boy car, but it's a matchbox. That's why no reviewers will show themselves or anyone else towering over it. It's for those who want a big car, but without all that space. Rivian calls it a mid-size SUV, but that is straight up bullshit.
I just looked up the dimensions and it's ridiculously big. You'd have trouble parking in it most places where I am from.
Based on the published dimensions, it's almost the exact same size as a Toyota 4Runner - which I'd consider a midsize SUV.
Comparison image: https://www.reddit.com/r/RivianR2/comments/1inep90/r2_vs_4ru...
If you want to see a reviewer next to it for scale, Doug DeMuro is 6'4" and has what you're looking for, from various angles over the course of the review. Looks like a reasonable size to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUl_0087dyM
"Matchbox" is rather hyperbolic and would better match the upcoming R3/R3X which is around the size of a VW Golf (though that still isn't that small… Honda Fits, kei cars, and Fiat 500s are smaller still).
It's about a foot longer than my crossover, which is about the same size as a RAV4 or CR-V and there's no way I could call it tiny.
it's 1" shorter but it's not teardrop shaped so volume wise should be good
Wait … so you’re saying they want a small car but are in denial?
> It's deceptively styled to look a big boy car, but it's a matchbox. That's why no reviewers will show themselves or anyone else towering over it. It's for those who want a big car, but without all that space.
I miss the days when men looking to compensate would buy sports cars. It wasn't any less ridiculous, but at least they (edit: the cars) were better looking and more fun to drive.
If only those ridiculous guys who wanted something fun to drive had realized how much more fun they could have by making fun of people and feeling superior.
Yikes, someone's a bit oversensitive
I guess it depends on what they were compensating for. Up until the 80's and 90's at least there was more association of racing cars with road cars that you could buy.
So that would associate you with the (A man's manly-man maybe?) driver of that car.
But now race cars are not really much like a production road car. And those older men with money don't necessarily want to be like the ever younger drivers being employed to win races.
As you say, ridiculous, but at least the sports cars were cool.
Nice edit.
"straight up bullshit" would be calling a 4runner-sized vehicle a "matchbox". Really highlights how ridiculous American's unnecessary lust is for massive vehicles.
No CarPlay, not interested.
I wish Rivian would stop trying to emulate Tesla on this front and add support for CarPlay. I don't want your UI.
I actually like the look of the Rivian and this is something I'm somewhat in the market for (or will be in the next few years) but I won't touch it without CarPlay.
as a tesla owner, all I can tell, carPlay is ugly child was born due to EU car makers, not capable of building proper infotainment system.
I want to drive, not constantly connect/accept privacy etc. Especially if that is a $100k+ car.
When i get into the car, the last thing I'd like to know how my car is getting connected to my phone, if there are any issues, especially if that is not my car.
I love how my car knows that in the morning i go to work, and wednesday evening i go to yoga, and put GPS, with best traffic options. 0 touch, all super seamless. No phones involved.
CarPlay has become somewhat of a standard. It's fine to say you personally don't need it, but many/most laymen will still expect their new car to support it.
If a PC was launched without Windows support, most people on HN might be able to live with it day-to-day, but it would still be a dealbreaker for the general population. Admittedly this isn't a fair comparison, but hopefully you understand my point.
Apparently there's a aftermarket device that will add Android Auto / CarPlay support by selectively taking over the infotainment display:
https://evplay.io/shop/ev-play-for-rivian
(I can't vouch for it, just something I stumbled upon recently.)
I was on team CarPlay/AndroidAuto too. But I’m willing to give Rivian the benefit of the doubt
The challenge for them is can they integrate a better in-car experience
CarPlay needs to get battery level
CarPlay supports that, the car just needs to pass it through. I believe Ford and Toyota both do.
i have a rivian, and despite being a carplay fan before, i do not miss it. Carplay is a crutch for legacy autos who cant make software, so you just want to overlay a phone feed over their crap. But its very limited, its essentially a video overlay box and has terrible / non-existent integration with the cars smarts, like battery, range, HUD screens, advanced audio controls, etc etc. In my experience with carplay in other smart-ish cars (BMW X series) the carplay experience fights with the car OS constantly and is an awful incoherent experience. A well made car software solution, like the rivians(mostly), is a better experience overall imho.
I say this as someone who still loves having carplay on my other car, a subaru, because their software is atrocious.
i would say, give one a try you might change your mind.
> the carplay experience fights with the car OS constantly and is an awful incoherent experience.
It seems to me like fixing this is the appropriate path forward. There are things that the car OS is better at (like you mention), but no car OS is ever going to support the various media apps I have on my phone that are automatically supported by Android/Android Auto media controls, and bluetooth playback is an even worse experience than cludging together the car OS + android auto media in one UI.
Yes, copy FSD instead that no CarPlay cult.
> copy FSD instead
They are. It’s also subscription based, however.
(For what it’s worth, my friends with Rivian are fine with its phone interface. As are most people who own Tesla’s fine without CarPlay.)
With FSD , that is a very very capable system in 2026, You need real multi media for driving (once it's solved), for camping , movies during charging, and not phone somehow ugly slapped by some plastic holder to your car.