![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nosrednaydujToday we started out with the aforementioned nearby protest. There were about 75 people, and the usual mix of happy tooting, nothing, and thumbs down/middle fingers (more of the former and less of the latter). In fact, there was more happy tooting and less nothing; I think people are primed to be upset about the whole situation. Best sign: "we all saw the video".
Then Ken and I rode our bicycles to a car shop 7 miles away which had a used (2023) Subaru Solterra. It's a lovely car, it fits Ken's bike, it has adaptive cruise and heated steering wheel. It has cool AI-ish feature where it has a camera in the front and a camera in the back and probably the sides also so that it can show you all the surrounding stuff, not just a backup camera, and it does some integration of what it has seen with those cameras and where you currently are and shows you what is underneath the car. When you turn in some way as you're backing up, you may cause the car to go over a place that has not yet been seen, and then it shows that as black in that area and corrects itself as it sees more and more. It shows you this surrounding stuff when going slowly even forward, and I think that's going to be great for me because I often do a bad job of parking between the lines.
It's a little bit wide for getting into the garage, but we think it's narrower than the Tesla. We measured the car and then we measured the garage opening and then we thought about how much clearance we normally have with the Tesla. And the surround vision thing will enable us to be much better about aim. I might paint some access lines on the driveway.
We then called Ken's electric car nerd friend and he's not a fan of the Solterra and suggested a bunch of different cars that might suit our needs. Unfortunately it is very difficult to find out the actual dimensions of the cargo space. They all say things like "83 cubic ft." I care about the shape more than the total volume! Which is why we had to actually go there with the bicycles. His nerd friend also says he knows about a place to get batteries that might be cheaper, but it's not clear that it's enough cheaper to warrant actually fixing our car. So anyway, we now have to decide if we want to spend many hours trying to get Ken's bicycle into different cars or if we just want to buy this one, regardless of nerds not liking it. It's possible that he doesn't like it because it's just an SUV and while it seemed to have pretty good pickup on the test drive, it's not a Tesla performance model S and this guy is all about speed.
Going home, I got ANOTHER FLAT. This was in the rear tire, which is not the one that I replaced in November. It appears I didn't blog about all my flats. Looking at order histories, it seems that I replaced the most recent one this past spring so it has less than 2000 miles on it. You'd think it should last longer than that? But anyway, I do have a spare! So I replaced it this evening. I was lazy at the side of the road and I called home for Valerie to come get me in the borrowed Prius rather than trying to fix the flat in situ.
Then Ken and I rode our bicycles to a car shop 7 miles away which had a used (2023) Subaru Solterra. It's a lovely car, it fits Ken's bike, it has adaptive cruise and heated steering wheel. It has cool AI-ish feature where it has a camera in the front and a camera in the back and probably the sides also so that it can show you all the surrounding stuff, not just a backup camera, and it does some integration of what it has seen with those cameras and where you currently are and shows you what is underneath the car. When you turn in some way as you're backing up, you may cause the car to go over a place that has not yet been seen, and then it shows that as black in that area and corrects itself as it sees more and more. It shows you this surrounding stuff when going slowly even forward, and I think that's going to be great for me because I often do a bad job of parking between the lines.
It's a little bit wide for getting into the garage, but we think it's narrower than the Tesla. We measured the car and then we measured the garage opening and then we thought about how much clearance we normally have with the Tesla. And the surround vision thing will enable us to be much better about aim. I might paint some access lines on the driveway.
We then called Ken's electric car nerd friend and he's not a fan of the Solterra and suggested a bunch of different cars that might suit our needs. Unfortunately it is very difficult to find out the actual dimensions of the cargo space. They all say things like "83 cubic ft." I care about the shape more than the total volume! Which is why we had to actually go there with the bicycles. His nerd friend also says he knows about a place to get batteries that might be cheaper, but it's not clear that it's enough cheaper to warrant actually fixing our car. So anyway, we now have to decide if we want to spend many hours trying to get Ken's bicycle into different cars or if we just want to buy this one, regardless of nerds not liking it. It's possible that he doesn't like it because it's just an SUV and while it seemed to have pretty good pickup on the test drive, it's not a Tesla performance model S and this guy is all about speed.
Going home, I got ANOTHER FLAT. This was in the rear tire, which is not the one that I replaced in November. It appears I didn't blog about all my flats. Looking at order histories, it seems that I replaced the most recent one this past spring so it has less than 2000 miles on it. You'd think it should last longer than that? But anyway, I do have a spare! So I replaced it this evening. I was lazy at the side of the road and I called home for Valerie to come get me in the borrowed Prius rather than trying to fix the flat in situ.
no subject
Date: 2026-01-12 10:48 pm (UTC)We've got a friend with a Solterra, and he likes his a lot. I definitely agree with you on how "so many cubic feet" really isn't a useful measurement unless you're carrying many small bean bags which can conform to any available space. Another really useful measurement that isn't easy to get is the actual opening size and how easy it is to get something into the back area (how high to you have to lift the bike, do you have to turn the handlebars one way to get it past an obstacle, but then turn them the other way once you get the bike in, etc.)
I'm sure you probably know this, but Subaru does have a good LGBT+ stance, at least with their marketing material. And they haven't screwed over their customer base.
no subject
Date: 2026-01-13 02:28 am (UTC)