Life with an EV (the Subaru Solterra BEV), so far

Before taking the plunge with the Solterra, I “auditioned” several battery powered electric vehicles (BEVs or EVs), over long weekends or a week (or more) as rentals. I’ve come a long way since my first Tesla Model 3 rental in ... 2021?

I had no idea what the big bulky CCS1 cable was at one DCFC charging station. (That rental came with a J1772 to NACS adapter, but nothing for the bigger DC equipment.) The first day or two I had the Tesla I was trying to charge it at Disneyland (which has ChargePoint J1772 level 2 chargers) and couldn’t figure out why it was only charging to 50% (the car had been limited to that charge level in settings; an easy fix once I figured it out, but when I asked on reddit, the overwhelming response was just “use a SuperCharger, ChargePoint sucks!” – not really helpful...). I’m sure I didn’t know how to read things like kilowatt capability, or grok things like shared chargers splitting available power between two charging cars. I got frustrated dealing with the limited availability and long waits at the local Electrify America charging oasis (which often had several stations offline for maintenance or repair, and though they have two connectors per station, only one can be active at a time) when I didn’t have a Tesla, wishing I could just hop over to the almost four dozen SuperChargers (none of which were shared; if you could hook up, you could charge) on the roof of a local supermarket.

Picked up a 2024 Subaru Solterra Limited almost 5 months ago, and have now lived with it long enough to, I think, really get what living with an EV is like. It’s my only vehicle at the moment, so I use it for everything from my relatively short daily commute (~5 miles round trip) to road trips up to wine country, errands, trips to Disneyland, and everything in between. My notes so far:

• Drives very nicely. I learned to drive in a Jeep Cherokee Limited and this feels a lot like that. And for good reason (chart below). It’s about 27% heavier with 13% more power, but a wildly different power curve (EV vs. internal combustion), and is faster 0-60. Inside it has about the same volume (the Cherokee, with a vertical rear window, slightly edges out the Solterra with its hatchback rear window). The external dimensions are pretty similar, though the Solterra is longer with a longer wheelbase. The Solterra gives me no real surprises, there isn’t an excessive amount of body roll, expansion joints in concrete freeways don’t make me feel like I’m riding the bull at Saddle Ranch, and while it lacks the “released Slinky” acceleration of the BMW M3, it’s fast enough to be safe punching through Los Angeles traffic. I’m satisfied.
• Range is ... acceptable. It passes the psychologically important 200 mile point (barely, and depending on the outside temperature, not always). This is one thing I wish it had more of. My Jeep got 250 (local) – 315 (all highway) miles per 20 gallon tank, which would run me $80-125 depending on shifting geopolitical realities.
  
• Charging speed is ... acceptable. I’m almost always recharging on a ~5.7 kW Level 2 charger at the office, where it will do a bit over 7% per hour of charging, on average. On a split capacity Level 2 at Disneyland (which will vary between 3.3 kW and 6.6 kW), I can get from under 10% to fully charged during a day a the parks. On the included Level 1, it’s about 2% (~4 miles of range) per hour. When I was using the “dual voltage” charger that came with it, limiting charging to 16A in the car (options are 8A, 16A, and Max (32A)), I was getting a little less than 5% charge per hour, averaged. (The $110 for the no-name charger on Amazon (Black Friday), which holds its 24A setting and provides about 50% faster charging, was money well spent.) I always charge to 100% on Level 2 chargers, time permitting, which is recommended by Toyota for the essentially identical bZ4X (“[w]e recommend charging as often as needed to maintain a sufficient state of charge for your anticipated trips ... [g]o ahead and charge to 100%”)).
• Level 3 charging is better for the 2024 than the 2023 Solterra, but still not amazing. Best case scenario, you’ll get 100 kW for a while, even if the DCFC is rated for 350 kW. Toyota (and Subaru) recommend: “To help maintain long-term battery health, DC Fast Charging should be limited to three cycles of charging (Low Light to 80%) per day throughout the year.”
• Commuting is a breeze, and not having bought gas in 5 months has been a revelation. (Of course, I’m spending as much on the car payment as I was on gas, but now I have a vehicle built within the last decade and no real worries about maintenance / unanticipated repairs, so...)
• Road trips require some more planning and a bit more waiting, but not that much. E.g., to go up to wine country, if I start at 100%, I’ll stop around Santa Barbara to go up to at least 80% (90% or more if no one’s waiting). There are two good Electrify America spots and between the two, I’ve never had to wait to charge. With that stop I can hit several wineries and go out for dinner and make it back to Los Angeles with at least 10% left, or if I don’t want any range anxiety, I can top off at a DCFC in Solvang or stop again around Santa Barbara and make it home with >40%. Charging to 80% on a Level 3 charger takes < 20 minutes typically; I keep a steering wheel desk in the back pocket of the front passenger seat (and almost always have a small laptop, or an iPad writing setup, or an eReader, or a portable keyboard and phone stand, with me) so I can knock out some emails or whatever while waiting.
  
  But with that 3x/day limit for Level 3 charging ... Starting out with a 100% overnight Level 2 charge and driving down to ~10% (call it 180 miles), with three recharges from 10 to 80% during the trip (call it ~140 miles each DCFC), gives you about a 600 mile daily range. Which, that’s about 10 hours of driving (and about an hour of charging), which is less than what I can do in the Jeep or BMW, but probably about what I should limit myself to. If the range dips to 75% in the cold (I’m guessing at this one), that’s 450 miles, so I could still easily make it to Mammoth (~300 miles away). The last multi-day road trip I did was to the St. Louis suburbs, and it was a bit over 1,800 miles each way, and ~27 hours, that I knocked out in two days going and two days returning (and it sucked). In the Solterra it would realistically be a 3 day trip each way.
• Pleasant surprises abound, from a relatively small winery adding EV charging, to free Level 2 charging at the KIA Forum, to free Level 2 charging at the underground parking garage across the street from one of my favorite haunts, to free solar powered Level 2 charging at a local municipal airport I fly out of regularly, to enjoying single-occupant access to the HOV lanes (even if only for a year) (I mounted the stickers on Slap Pass magnets).
  
• Amenities are, coming from 2-3 decade old rides, awesome:
• Wireless CarPlay with a working wireless phone charger
• Great sounding Harman/Kardon stereo system
• 4x USB-C charging ports (one for each seat) plus a USB-A interface to hardware a phone into the infotainment system
• 4x heated seats
• Nice big 12.3" infotainment screen plus a gauge cluster where I expect it to be
• Mostly “real controls” for interacting with the car. I kinda wish the media system had a volume knob, and that the climate controls had more real physical tactile buttons, but at least the temperature and fan speed settings are.
  
• Nanny mode is kind of obnoxious, but not as bad as Tesla’s (“you can’t use the rainbow road for the rest of this trip because I caught you not staring straight ahead twice!”). A couple of times the car has automatically braked when navigating parking and it was disconcerting and a bit frustrating, and I wish I could permanently disable some warnings, like the cross-traffic alert (I know there’s cross-traffic, I’m looking at it, and I don’t need the car distracting me with urgent alerts as I pull out from a building driveway into the flow...).
• Automation is nice but not where it could be. I do really like the lane tracing and adaptive cruise control, and Traffic Jam Assist is nice.
• Monthly fees are something I’m resistant to on principle, but we’ll see when the one year free trial runs out. (Covers the phone app for remote locking/unlocking/monitoring charge status, TrafficJamAssist, the enhanced parking assist feature I don’t think I’ve ever used...)
• 360° Cameras are something I never thought I’d want, until I got ’em. Getting into tight parking spaces has never been easier.
• Seats etc. are comfortable enough.
  

	Cherokee	Solterra
Width:	70.5"	73.2"
Height:	63.3"	65"
Length:	168.8"	184.6"
Wheelbase:	101.4"	112.2"
Ground Clearance:	7.8"	8.3"
Front Headroom:	39.4"	38.8"
Front Legroom:	41.1"	42.1"
Front Shoulder Room:	57.6"	57.8"
Passenger Volume:	95 cubic feet	95.7 cubic feet
Cargo Volume:	?	23.8 cubic feet
Maximum cargo volume:	71.0 cubic feet	63.5 cubic feet
Empty Weight:	3477 lb. (approx., with full gas tank)	4,431 lb.
Horsepower:	190	215
Torque:	225 lb. ft.	249 lb. ft.
Power/Weight Ratio:	0.06 hp/lb	0.05 hp/lb
Top Speed:	~112 mph (drag)	124.9 mph
0-60:	~8.4 sec(?)	6.1 sec (C&D tested)
Four wheel drive:	Part time Command-Trac	Full time Symmetrical All-Wheel Drive

So, yeah, I’ve settled into a routine, including the occasional road trip, and like it a lot. I know I’m not exactly a cutting edge early adopter here, but it does definitely feel like this is the early days of what will become the new normal (albeit maybe over a longer timespan than many would prefer).

A typical day of charging at the office

With that “BLRENT” charger conveniently retaining the setting limiting it to 24A even when unplugged, I’m wringing everything I can from the 240V 30A circuit at the office, and charging about 7% per hour.

BRLEMT charger showing stats, settings

Solterra dash estimating time to 100% charge

Suckling from the SoCal Edison teet

To 100% or not to 100%

That is the question. Ordinarily, charging an LiIon battery to 100% constantly is sub-optimum: “Chevrolet Bolts are experiencing battery issues because 30% of owners charge them to 100% when a maximum level of 90% is recommended [citation][;] [s]ome consumers may recharge to 100% on a Level 2 charger (240V), while others recharge to 90 percent on a Level 3 charger (480V) [and] both options have negative consequences for owners including possible degradation...”) But Toyota/Subaru have reportedly built in a buffer; when the Solterra reports 100% state of charge (SOC), it’s based on a lower than full capacity actual battery state of charge. Subaru specs the battery at 72.8 kWh, while Car & Driver tests it to approximately 65.4 kWh, about 90% of the actual capacity. So 100% isn’t 100%. Also, you generally want to decrease the cycles on a battery (e.g., only using 70% of the capacity - from 10% to 80% - will cycle the battery ~29% more times than going from “reported” 100% to 10%), and more than even that, you want to avoid deeper discharges: “[T]he depth of discharge (DoD) determines the cycle count of the battery. The smaller the discharge (low DoD), the longer the battery will last. If at all possible, avoid full discharges and charge the battery more often between uses.”

I’m still learning all of this, but my current take-away and use plan is roughly:

• Monday after a weekend of doing “stuff,” charge to 100% at the office.
• Friday after a weekend of commuting, errands, etc., charge to 100% at the office.
• I’ll Level 2 charge If I’m somewhere like Disneyland where it makes sense to plug in because I (a) expended a significant amount of charge getting there (e.g., Disneyland is about a 40 mile trip each wayh, so ~12.5 kWh, or about a 19% hit to the SOC) and (b) I’ll be there long enough for it to matter.

EV Charging at the Mickey & Friends Parking Structure, Disneyland

• I only Level 3 DCFC if I’m on a longer trip where Level 2 charging would just be impracticable. E.g., to do a “usual” winery loop day trip, with a stop at Hendry’s Beach for the dogs, is about a 330 mile loop. If I L2 recharged at the halfway point, that’d be about 52 kWh, almost 8 hours of charging. On a Level 3 charger, under 2 hours to hit 100% again; more realistically, ABRP suggests I do what I do, stop 2x to charge to ~80%. (Though the ABRP plan would have me down to 19% at Foxen - which has a charging station, so not the end of the world, but some unease with that being the plan - and arriving home at 20%, which is probably fine, especially since once I’m back in the L.A. metro area, charging stations are a lot easier to find...)

 

ABRP’s suggested route and recharging stops for a wine country loop

Other EVs

The other cars I’ve spent some time with:

• Tesla Model 3
• 🟢 Decent range
• 🟢 Drives nicely
• 🟢 Supercharger networks are 🔥
• 🟢 I liked how the built-in navigation would calculate the amount of charge you’d have remaining at the end of the trip, but really, it’s simple math, so I find I don’t really need it now that I’m using CarPlay in the Subaru. Pre-conditioning the battery before charging seems useful but I’m not sure how much real world effect it has?
  
• 🟡 The “rainbow road” quasi-self-driving functionality worked really well, but the nagging and arbitrary limiting was annoying.
• 🟡 To get into an equivalent to the Solterra in terms of AWD and dog-carrying capacity, I’d have been looking at a dual motor Model Y, which at the time was about $18K more than the Subaru with the incentives.
• 🟡 The black hole where the instrument cluster would normally be was disconcerting.
• 🟡 Questions about build quality / longevity.
  
• 🔴 No Apple CarPlay.
• 🔴 Maniacal insistence on reducing controls more and more. They’ve even done away with the turn signal stalk now. Digging through touchscreen “pages” to do something as basic as adjusting the side mirrors is, for me, a bridge too far.
• 🔴 The charging port is hella inconvenient for a lot of public charging situations. E.g., at Disneyland, all the spots are angled to make pulling in head first easy, but to park a Tesla so as to be able to charge it, you’d have to do a multi-point turn in a cramped aisle to back the car in, all the while blocking the traffic flow for everyone behind you...
• 🔴 The wireless phone chargers were extremely temperamental, you had to align the phone just right for it to work at all, and any bump or turn while driving and the phone would shift. Limited options for wired charging.
  
• Chevy Bolt EV
• 🟢 Decent range
• 🟢 Conveniently located charging port
  
• 🟡 Wired CarPlay
• 🟡 At least in the trim levels I drove, no “self driving” at all.
• 🟡 At least in the trim levels I drove, no conveniences at all, e.g., had to get out of the car to open the rear lift gate
  
• 🔴 Drove like shit, bounced down the freeway when going over expansion joints (heavy car, short wheelbase)
  
• 🔴 Interior felt really cheap and uncomfortable
  
• Nissan Leaf
• Not much time with this one, the range was so short I returned it the next morning when the shop found me a Tesla.
  
• Polestar 2
• 🟢 Decent acceleration.
• 🟢 Felt like a high quality, well built, vehicle.
  
• 🟡Very heavy handling. Didn’t feel “sporty” at all.
  
• 🟡 Wired CarPlay.
• 🟡 When I drove it, turn-by-turn directions were only on the center screen, but apparently software update P2.9 added that.
• 🟡 “Self driving” was very “meh.”
• 🟡 Annoying distractions, like an illuminated Polestar logo reflecting down off the sunroof.
  
• 🔴 Couldn’t get wireless charging to work.
• 🔴 Holy blind spots! An almost worthless rear view mirror, huge B pillars.
• 🔴 Very uncomfortable seat (apparently there’s an anti-submarine bar buried inside?)
  
• KIA Niro EV
• I kind of just remember this one as being “fine.” Drove surprisingly well, felt surprisingly solid, CarPlay (albeit with an awkwardly long reach to the other side of the screen). Front charging port. Decent enough “self driving.” No AWD, though, and that (plus at least M+S tires) was a requirement for me. (With snow capable tires and AWD, you don’t need to stop and install chains on R1 or R2 days.)