Subaru was talking about an electric model over 20 years ago! I saw the concept drawings. Whoever has run Subaru for the last 20 years needs to be given a watch and thanked for their service on their way out the door.
Subaru is not a large car manufacturer. Toyota sells over 10x the amount of cars and Nissan sells 3x-5x, they are not equals. And Nissan did build an electric car 16 years ago and the company is currently circling the drain.
EV development also gets easier every year as it becomes more common. Companies don't have to have cutting-edge technology to compete, and Subaru has plans to release their own EV platform in 2029. I do not expect it to be cutting edge, but loyal Subaru owners won't be expecting that either.
And their US market just happens to overlap with the EV early adopter market. Symmetrical all-wheel drive, the thing that snow drivers need, is easy peasy for an electric.
For context, i had a 2014 BMW i3 for about 8 years, the design was neat, the engineering undependable, an Audi A5 for 2.x years, truly excellent and i loved it like my old used SAAB 900 turbo of long ago, and a BMW i4 xdrive40 for 3 years, truly shitty engineering, but pretty shape and paint job.
The Subaru EV does share components with Toyota/Lexus(/Subaru) but handles __way__ better than the BMW for 2/3 the price, has vastly nicer EV component design (like heat pump and periphery, which is outsourced by BMW and failed on both my i3 and i4).
Yes.
https://www.subaru.com/vehicle-info/article/what-is-apple-ca...
I don't know if it's gotten any better, but I won't buy another Subaru after my 2020. It constantly beeps at me whenever the EyeSight can't see the lanes in the road, even when it's not steering for me. It's a safety hazard that pretends to be a safety feature.
And yes it beeps and you can't turn the beeping off completely. It's supposed to annoy you into using the blinkers properly. Different cars/model years seem to have different levels of annoyingness in the actual beep and different volume settings available though.
My (also 2020) never beeps when EyeSight can't see the lanes, whether its steering or not. It beeps when you cross a line without blinking or you're crossing the lines and would soon be driving on the shoulder/into the trees. It does sometimes have issues where it beeps a bit too early, i.e. it seems the calculations from the visuals are a bit off in certain situations.
I don't get the "turning off because lane markings" comment tbh and we got some pretty bad ones here as well, especially in winter (i.e. often none at all :) Are we talking completely different things or did they change anything past 2024 models (last one I know)?
Coz EyeSight does not turn off just because there are no markings. It turns off if it can't see, i.e. too much rain, smudgy glass in front of the cameras etc. It doesn't care about the lane markings just to follow the car in front of me. But sure if it can't find the lane markings then I can't enable the auto-steering (which I find way too janky anyway - pretty annoying that it seems to steer left and right between the markings instead of holding steady in the middle and adjusting smoothly, so I never use it).
I can never remember where settings I touch exactly once to set them up either. For any car. Set it and forget it.
No experience with carplay but Android Auto support does depend a lot on the phone. My older Motorola and Samsung phone always sucked, often didn't connect at all with most cables. Since I got a Pixel, zero problems at all.
Also, it locks onto cars taking the offramp... and as they slow down, you'll be in an empty right lane going 45mph. I've driven a 2024, and a 2025, and the 2025 has way less false alarms, but it still drives me crazy.
Oh yeah, and my favorite thing about adaptive cruise, is how you come to a stop in traffic, and the cruise control just turns off, but only after you're stopped for more than 15 seconds of so. Then it beeps at you telling you the car in front of you is moving. Thanks dickhead, how about you just accelerate and follow the car then like you would do if you only stopped for 5 seconds?
And not to mention, with the steering on, and my hands on the wheel, it bitches at me to put my hands on the wheel. MY HANDS ARE ON THE WHEEL. The only way to get it to realize your hands are on the wheel is to turn the damn steering wheel just a tiny bit, and let it fight back against you the whole time.
Total fucking garbage.
It won't start unless I've done my seatbelt up, which is annoying when I'm e.g. driving in a cow paddock at 10km/h and trying to get through multiple gates, but it doesn't do lane assist or have a driver-facing camera or anything like that.
(not sponsored)
If they think they need to show you this (for whatever reason, their legal department said so), then it has nothing to do with bad UX design but really, being in between a rock and a hard place. If my legal team made me do this, I'd also show it every single time, because you have zero guarantee that the person driving the car this time is the same person that saw and accepted the dialog the last time. Even if you think about "driver profiles", that totally goes out the window in a rental car scenario for sure and even in a non-rental one, not everyone that has a car that has "driver profiles" will make use of the feature.
So as a dev I would show this for whatever period of time legal required me to show it, to CYA for the above cases and then I'd just close it because I don't want to annoy people so much as to actually require an actual "click" on the accept button.
Im guessing its the opposite - the devs involved in this were probably outsourced (famously legacy car manufacturers do this, its all cobbled together external chunks), and didnt give a shit at all. Closed the jira task for compliance and moved on without a second thought. This is why Subaru and other legacy car companies make such atrocious UX.
Like I’m sure people will have preferences or pet peeve that effects one brand more than another other, but the infotainment systems just all seem uninspiring to me. Some do some parts better while doing others worse.
Please name some cars that have standout bad/good infotainment because none of those stood out either way.
Or at least since you’re griping about what you think is a particularly bad one, name three good ones.
Also it's based on Google maps which I'm also not a big fan of.
If they sold reliable PHEVs or even BEVs with 220mm+ ground clearance and some branding around torque and traction control, and they had any kind of advantage over Toyota in that niche, they'd probably do alright in the "I don't want a Land Cruiser BUT" market.
(Yeah, yeah, EJ head gaskets, just don't buy anything with an EJ series engine.)
If I want that, why wouldn’t I buy Toyota/Honda?
This curious bit is that it was 'You want something between a Toyota/Honda and a Lexus/Acura, but closer to the capability of a Jeep'. Where it's more curious, is that the modern Subaru hybrids are actually better at off-roading than the new Jeep Cherokee hybrid.
Why is that? Well at least IMO it's cause Subaru sticks to their guns, their hybrid system sticks to what they have always tried to do versus the Jeep doing, at least AFAIK, the same sort of 'AWD' hybrid setup of most hybrids, where the rear wheels are electric only and you have to wait for the computer to decide to apply Any power.
Interestingly, The closest hybrid AWD design I'm aware of to what Subaru is doing, is Ford with the AWD HF55 on the Maverick, in that case they are doing it to also help make sure it can meet the needs for 4K towing.
It's not as efficient, but it is at last consistent from a branding execution strategy. Definitely moreso than Jeep who has watered down everything they sell so much it's... who knows anymore.
(Subaru marketshare is already fairly small in Europe, but an interesting data point imho as global electrification continues)
Related:
Europe EV sales rose 70.3% in September, 32.6% of market share - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50155291 - October 2026 (167 comments, as of this comment)
EV Sales Are Booming in Europe with Gasoline at $10 a Gallon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49870928 - September 2026 (150 comments)
Europe EV Sales BEVs Jump 50% & Reach 26% Market Share - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49147450 - August 2026 (188 comments)
Tracking:
https://ember-energy.org/data/ev-sales-tracker/
https://robbieandrew.github.io/carsales/?lang=en&freq=monthl...
- a subaru forester owner who wanted to like the vehicle but is tired of oil leaks and counting the days before a head gasket lets go