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Comment by jorvi | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, it has never been about pure brand. Every brand has had clunkers and has had great models.

Having said that, Toyota is known for their reliability, and Volvo (+ Polestar) was / are known for their safety.

Just to emphasize the point: Nissan is doomed because generally no one wants their cars, but they have perhaps one of the greatest bang-for-buck EVs outside of Chinese brands: the Leaf 2.

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Nissan makes fantastic cars that develop a following, and then proceeds to change everything about the car that created a following in the first place. Mitsubishi seem to be learning this skill from them. Toyota still sells cars that have a direct lineage to the original model 40 years ago, and charges a fortune for them.

I have a 2022 model Leaf, the one with 230 miles range, and it's... boring in a good way. It just works. Zero problems whatsoever and zero noticeable battery degradation after about 27K miles. Only big downside is poor rapid charging, but we use ours as a city car and rarely if ever need it.

Put a CCS fast charge port and better battery cooling in this thing and it'd be the perfect boring reliable EV with physical dash controls (no touch screen BS).

My girlfriend has the same car and I had about the same feeling in it - it's just a cheap Nissan that happens to be electric (and I mean that in a good way). As you said, quite good as a city car, and we even did a short road trip in it, but the lack of chargers for it does produce some range anxiety.

That's been my experience with a 2015 Leaf. It's ugly and the range is trash, and that it. It's a dolled up golf cart but in a good way.

I want my tools to be boring, do something and do it well, and with minimum fuss.

Leaf doesn't have active cooling nor CCS... That's a big reason they have to price it like that. I'd rather take a Toyota busy forks in the current market. Chevy Equinox is pretty good bang for buck too.

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