I’ve had software issues on an ID4 and iX, but I’ve never had reliability problems. The cars always have just worked with no maintenance. Same with my model Y, minus any issues!
Maybe it’s a “but when it happens you’re screwed” situation. I’m thinking of the story of BMW’s battery safety fuse (the one that trips in an accident to protect first responders and the people in the car) actually tripping when you hot the curb or a pothole harder. It requires a very expensive trip to the dealer. Some of my Tesla owning friends keep spending time in the shop getting something about the suspension fixed 2-3 times already.
I have no idea if Chinese EVs are consistently better, Volvo can be seen as one and I don’t think they excel at reliability lately.
P.S. Software issues are reliability issues. The software is a core part of the car and its value proposition, you can’t discount them as “just software issues, not reliability”.
> Some of my Tesla owning friends keep spending time in the shop getting something about the suspension fixed 2-3 times already.
They're pretty lucky from what I hear! A friend of mine just sold his Model S because he'd been waiting over 7 months for the shop to source a replacement part. Apparently he'd even resorted to begging Musk to look into it over X because Tesla wont even give him an ETA.
iD4 feels like they took every lesson of predictable UX design and then intentionally reversed it to make the most frustrating UI possible.
The window controls, touch buttons, screen, steering wheel controls, etc. They all seem designed to answer the question, "how could we make this unnecessarily difficult and distracting to use? How could we possibly cram in yet another State Machine for the user to keep (lose) track of?"
It also has the "try to kill the asthmatic by randomly switching off recirculate while driving through dense wood smoke" feature, naturally.
Considering how much money VW makes on EVs[0], I suppose I'm not surprised by this 'nudge' toward gas cars.
