I travel a lot for work and my company policy is for us to rent the cheapest Hertz car available and, in SoCal, these are usually BEVs.
My last one was Subaru Solterra EV. I am not a professional driver or reviewer just an old guy that have been around.
My daughter has a crosstreck and the overall feeling of the car driving was very close.
Cons.
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Less than 200 miles range is not as comfortable for me in the LA area, because I drive more than that in a week so I need to recharge during the week and it takes few hours that I would prefer using for something else.
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I do not understand the central console design, it is at best annoying and oversized, and cannot really use for anything because it will fly off as soon you start moving. Understand the hidden phone remote charging well but the it is not very ergonomic to me.
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it has a lot of features but also has the largest amounts of buttons and controls that I ever found in an economic BEV with the net results that most of the features are hard to find. Just for fun, I had a very hard time to set the AC and find the buttons was the biggest problem. Overall it is very confusing.
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the SW is responsive but somehow antagonistic. Keep on ringing errors and telling you to check the manual instead of providing any clue of what I was doing wrong.
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Subscribe for the Navigation App?? I had TomTom vibes. Tried Apple car, worked but basically need to pick using Apple or the car features. On top of that it annoyingly keep on switching to top camera views at intersections when you mostly need directions.
Pros.
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when I finally found the button for single pedal driving it was a pleasure to drive, but I went through all the screen menus first, and still I could not figure how to set it to stop.
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the collision avoidance and safety features are great, acceleration and 4 wheels drive are well merged and you need it driving in LA when it rains.
Overall not a bad experience, better than ICE and it did the job.
You can turn off the auto Birds Eye camera that activates at slow speeds. There’s a button on the screen that has an A with a camera. Click that.
I looked at a Solterra not too long ago when I was car shopping. I just don’t understand the Subaru design language. All that black plastic cladding around the wheels — yuck.
That car is one of the worse of it class on the market. If you didn’t drive another EV before driving it, you’d hate EVs.
I do not know if it is the worst but it has its own personality and quirks.
However it is still better handling and feeling of even the crosstreck in my humble opinion.
Sure it feels heavier than crosstreck so it may feel different off-road than in my urban test.
I’ve had mine for about 3 weeks and figured out most of the controls in the first 2.
Did you figure out why it complains when trying to push the single pedal button and tell to check the user manual?
I looked it up but I did not find it. Also how do I set the single pedal to end up stopping the car?
Thank you
Bz4x is best