I have the 2019. I needed AWD, as I have 10 miles of muddy roads to get to my house. I now regret not buying a Subaru for the 10k above MSRP or whatever the ransom was back then. The milage on the Outlander PHEV is comically terrible once the battery is empty. Yet somehow, it's a "clean air vehicle" (LOL) It's also crazy to me that "SPORT" utility vehicles don't have a trailer hitch by default. What are people using these things for? Oh yeah, automakers have convinced people living in cities that they need an oversized disgusting SUV to be safe, increase their odds of running over children, pets, and having catastrophic rollovers. The automakers like it because SUV's have much almost no safety standards compared to cars and no gas milage CAFE requirements!
I often hate myself for owning an SUV, but it was most practical vehicle for the rural area I'm in that was available at the time for a reasonable price.
Biggest annoyances with the Outlander
1) 12v system dies even when you have enough energy on board to power a house for a day.
2) It's a cargo ship with no cargo room. The front seats don't go all the way down, so I can't fit anything in this environmental disaster that I couldn't fit in a Ford Fiesta Hatchback. The back seats have things like cup holders and weird design features blocking the ability to use it to move stuff.
3) Why did they reinvent how you shift into gear? I need to explain to people who use my car how to put it into drive and park.
4) No spare tire! Now, I drive around with a spare floating around in the back that I purchased since not having a spare is a disaster waiting to happen in a rural area.
</rant>
Yeah, I will drive this into the ground and never buy an SUV again.
What kind of mileage do you get? I have around 4,000 miles on the car now and I have 39 MPG average. I just took a longer trip (1,600 miles total) and averaged 27.5 mpg for the trip. A good deal of my other driving is shorter regional trips which are too far for a bike to be practical. I average around 60 MPG, having the 42 miles of range on the battery helps.
Agree with you on the cargo space. My previous car is an Outback and has just as much usable space as this car, which is a larger vehicle. The main reason I got this car is I wanted a plug-in hybrid and it was the one that met my requirements and was available.
A station wagon is a great form factor for me. Plenty of room inside the vehicle and lower to the ground so it's easy to put stuff on the roof rack. Unfortunate that no one is really making them.
Haha, this is true. What's frustrating is that my PHEV has 12kw of battery, but I can't let it sit for more than a week without needing to jump it because they can't charge the 12v battery off of the drive-train battery system. DOH!
Agree with all of this, however, I remember when an American car making it to 100k miles without major problems was nearly unheard of. Or at least, that's how I seem to remember it. My parents had several Dodge / Chrysler's in the 1990's that had catastrophic failure before reaching 100k miles. The exception was our Ford Escort which lasted to 180k miles before the engine needed a rebuild, which likely had something do with a sibling not changing the oil for 25k miles.
It seems like we have more reliable engines, drive trains, and less reliable $2 chips that turns those things on.
Absolute garbage. Made me swear off domestic cars.
> we have more reliable engines
I think one of the best inventions to really come into use in the last 25 years is multi-layered steel (MLS) head gaskets. A lot of cars use to pop head gaskets regularly when they were made of compressed paper and other things. After the switch to MLS, even shitty Dodges could go the life of the car with a blown head gasket. Not blowing a head gasket means a lot less wear on every other part of the engine: no more oil in your coolant, coolant in your oil etc.
That and stainless steel exhaust systems are underrated inventions. I remember seeing dropped mufflers on the side of the highway regularly when I was a kid. Then it just kind of... stopped. Didn't find the reason until many years later: the switch to stainless exhausts.
Years ago Jeremy Clarkson wrote in a Times column (where he is generally less trollish than his TV shows) that he rejected the idea that Japanese car makers only copy: they were responsible for the great innovation of the idea that a car could be something that you get in, that starts reliably, and that you don't find yourself guessing whether you'll be able to use it on a day-to-day basis.
People who suffered through cars in the 70s and even 80s would be inclined to agree with him; unfortunately, it turns out that Bill Gates was wrong, and when cars are built the way programmers code, it takes us back to that lamentable state of affairs.
It's definitely more common today, but it did happen even back then. I think part of the issue was that back then more of the population was in the north where the cars would rust before they hit that mileage.
Ironically the private car that holds the world record for the most miles is the Volvo p1800 from the 60's. It wasn't American, but was an interesting feat non the less.
I had the trusty 4.0L I-6 in my '89 Cherokee. 160k miles on it when it was sold to the next owner (local garages didn't want to touch it/wanted to fix way more than needed and I was too far for regular visits to my dad's garage; it now does offroading stuff with the new owner).
My dad has seen these go to 285k before the (original) transmission gave up (which retired the engine too). Over 300k was also reported. Of course, upkeep among mechanics is also likely of higher quality too.
Alas, AMC is no more and Chrysler ruined their engines out of jealousy (at least that's my dad's view on it).
Depending on the year and trim it could have been one of those escorts with the Mazda ‘b’ engine from the Miata, which unlike the Ford motor in my ‘91 Escort that blew a head gasket at just over 100k miles was a good reliable motor.
Interestingly this was a collaboration with the European Ford team as far as I understand (although apparently the end result diverged quite a bit). Maybe they got some hot tips around build quality :)
That was not my experience, nor anything I've ever heard.
As a broad and imprecise statement, American cars in the 80s rarely ran past 100k, while Japanese cars commonly did. I read a few stories of American cars reaching 200k, but I saw a lot of Toyotas sailing past 200k.
And considering how awfully I saw those Toyotas treated, I don't think it had anything to do with maintenance.
Yeah, I haven't seen any actual data. But it seems widely accepted that American automakers in the 80s and 90s lost a lot of market share to foreign makers over (real or perceived) reliability issues.
Japanese makes were much more reliable when they hit the market, but US automakers did step up during the late 80s, although never to the level of the Japanese.
Detroit, moreover, built itself a reputation in the 70s and early-to-mid 80s for building overpriced junkbox boat-anchors, which continues to this day.
The reputation may continue but American cars are much more reliable today. They may not match the best of the Japanese but they seem to beat the European makes significantly.
Isn't Tesla touch handle doors? Not sure who else has them. Not sure what benefit they add anyway. I'd imagine there is some sort of manual override for when the 12v system dies and you can't get into the car?
My guess (based on living on a dirt road which gets everything in a vehicle coated in a layer of fine clay dust) is that it reduces the number of water/dirt ingress points so the door lock lasts longer.
I've had to take the door panels off two vehicles now to clean dirt out of the locks to get them working again.
Not all of them. Model Y's and I think 3's you push on the big spot and that pushes the lever out to grab. I think it might only be the higher end S and X models that have the handles pop out electronically.
Correctly migrated several stupidly complex docker files. I spent several hours on Google trying to figure out what to do, then I just asked gpt-4 to figure out what was wrong. It was perfect.
It then added complete TS documentation to several dozen files, because documentation is for suckers. It will use this documentation in the future.
Updated about half of my API documentation, fixing my speeling errors.
And we had a nice discussion about how to start saving money for an early forced retirement and about the specific tasks it would be doing when it replaced me.
I wrote plugins for Code to add TSDoc comments to all my methods. Also, right click refactor and comment. It's nice now. Soon it will make me unemployed.
So, is any sort of creation that relies upon copyrighted or patented works copyright infringement? Is any academic research or art that references brands or other creations illegal? This is such a clear case of fair use that it could be a textbook example.
