The Implications of the Chip Shortage on Car Purchases and Resale Value

Some BMWs tell you that you're not going to get a wireless charging pad, and for instance, the BMW 230i has it written on the sticker that you get credit for not having a satellite radio. These are some of the implications of the chip shortage. Yeah, um I Alex do you think that if someone were to buy this 230i when we go to sell it, do you think that someone's going to say "Oh, it's missing the satellite radio, can you give me like $50 off?" Do you think someone is going to hurt resale value when things are missing? Maybe not the satellite radio but some other cars have actually announced that GM had a while where they weren't selling right trucks with cylinder deactivation that hurt fuel economy. Some folks are talking about heated seats, you know, there are some slightly more significant ones. Yeah, I think it depends on the car and the feature. Um, but in thinking about this is an interesting question, uh I think there's a short-term and then a long-term right. Short-term, I think it probably would depending on the feature something like heated seats. I know you know up here in the Northeast, we all quite enjoy heated seats, heated steering wheel things like that. So if they were missing, I could totally see somebody um, you know, passing on that vehicle because of that or, or like you said, asking for maybe a price discount or something.

And same with the Silverado with the cylinder deactivation, you mentioned, I could see you know, you think you're going to get worse fuel economy that could totally influence your decision. Um, on the flip side though, potentially and just the theory but maybe down the road depending on the vehicle if it's something like that that BMW 230 which might have some kind of enthusiast appeal when it becomes older and more classic later on maybe some of these features that make it simpler because they're missing um might actually increase the appeal. Yeah, something going back to the cylinder deactivation maybe it makes the vehicle a little more reliable simpler just has less going on potentially. Um, probably more far-fetched but you know I think it's it's tricky too because at first as the chip was kind of coming to light, it was automakers saying okay we're going to leave this feature out we're going to leave this feature out. It was very direct and you were able to understand what was being missing or whatever um as this goes on and ad nauseam it feels like it's becoming less clear what's not being included right a lot of websites, dealer websites they just say things might not be included because of the chip shortage contact your dealer for more information so um I think it might just get a little messy later on as to try to figure out what a car has doesn't have um. Just uh you know the information is not so clear.

The Chip Shortage and Its Impact on Car Purchases

Is it slowing purchases of some models? Um, yeah, i wrote about this sort of Ben Preston wrote about this a couple of us wrote about this for CR so if you search for chip shortage on cr.org you'll find it. But it's with some industry analysts that said is it is that automakers are kind of concentrating on the cars they can build, they're sort of triaging their production lines, to keep their production lines running, and uh to get the most profitable cars out so you're seeing maybe they're not going to build as many sedans because they would like to put those chips into SUVs which are faster selling with higher margins. You're going to see cars paradoxically sometimes cars with more features because that can pad those margins and be more profitable for the automaker.

So yeah, it's sort of artificially slowing purchases on some models because they're not building them as much um so so absolutely you're gonna see some uh those bottlenecks making it to the model mix and and I think and what some industry analysts have told me is that you know that those crazy high numbers for the average new car transaction price that can be, you know that has a little to do with it too because they're the automakers are making those most profitable models they're not making as many of those entry-level ones. So yeah, interesting time to be buying a car uh interesting time to be making cars interesting time to be talking cars.

The BMW 230i: A Model with a Complex Resale Value

A car like the BMW 230i has some features that might make it more desirable later on, even if they're not included in its standard specification. For example, maybe its lack of satellite radio will become an appealing feature for some buyers when they realize how much they were getting for free. Additionally, the absence of certain features could potentially increase the car's appeal as a classic or enthusiast model down the line.

However, it's worth noting that this is still largely speculative at this point, and there are many variables to consider when determining the impact of the chip shortage on resale value. Automakers have already begun to adjust their production lines in response to the shortage, which may affect the availability of certain models in the future. Ultimately, it will be up to individual buyers and sellers to navigate these changes and determine what features are truly valuable.

The Silverado with Cylinder Deactivation: A Model with a Complicated Fuel Economy

If you're considering buying or selling a truck like the Silverado that has cylinder deactivation technology, there's a lot to consider when evaluating its resale value. On one hand, the absence of this feature could potentially make the car less desirable for some buyers who are looking for maximum fuel efficiency. On the other hand, as the market continues to adapt to the chip shortage and production changes, the Silverado may become more appealing to certain types of buyers.

One possible scenario is that some buyers will see the lack of cylinder deactivation technology as a selling point, given its potential impact on fuel economy. In this case, the car's resale value could increase as it becomes harder for buyers to find alternatives with similar performance and efficiency.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey talking cars fans we're making plans for our 4th of july episode and we want to hear from you so we want to know what does it mean for a car to be considered america does it have to be built here come from a company based in the u.s what do you consider to be the most american vehicle of all time email or texted video talking cars at icloud.com and give us your definition of what it means for a car to be american and what you think is the most epic iconic american car ever we're gonna choose our favorite responses and include them in the podcast that's talking cars at icloud.com now onto the show hey welcome back i'm keith barry i'm alex isaac i'm gabe shanhart and this week we are talking about a a new electric car as as we so frequently are these days uh that we rented it is subaru's first fully electric vehicle uh it's called the soltera uh and it's it's based on a toyota uh but we'll talk about that later you know let's let's talk about the the car itself it's it's itself first and you know give it its due uh gabe subaru you know they haven't had a real electric offering before they've sort of had that that half-hearted plug-in hybrid for for a few minutes there and as um as the market goes electric and electrifies do you think this is going to keep subaru drivers in the fold because i can i can see i don't know about you but i know enough about the average subaru driver to to think that maybe there's some interest in electrification here subaru customers have been clamoring for an ev for a while and uh yes you mentioned the uh the token uh crosstrek uh plug-in hybrid but uh now uh again and again this is a collaboration between toyota and subaru and uh the solterra is uh plugs in right into that new modern uh new crop of evs that converge around fifty thousand dollars starting at about forty five thousand and uh it's it's an suv it's functional it's uh it has all-wheel drive and uh it can totally answer all the the needs and wants of uh of any subaru customer and uh we've experienced it you know it's the car is very pleasant uh i mean it's quick it's quiet it rides well it handles responsible responsively so uh i think uh subaru has a real a real asset on it on their hand here yeah uh alex you've driven it too um you know what what what do you what do you think in terms of because you know subaru's whole selling point is is all-wheel drive and that's sort of par for the course for evs and that sort of almost suv height it you know this it seems like a lot of companies can outdo subaru now that they're going electric uh what do you what do you think about about this can it can it compete yeah it it it kind of falls into a weird place i think um but there are some things about it that give it that subaru edge you mentioned the standard all-wheel drive most other evs you you do have to kind of go to a higher trim or option all-wheel drive specifically and we'll talk price later i don't i don't know that there's a price advantage here with the soltera that you're getting all-wheel drive for less money necessarily but another thing it does come standard with some off-road features it has subaru's x-mode which you know manages power to each corner a little differently um it also has some ground clearance that some of the other evs that it competes with like id4 and ionic five don't necessarily have it's about eight and a half inches which nothing crazy but it might be that extra we're not going to take it on the rock wall right we are not okay um yeah it's not quite there but it might have enough to get you you know down that trail to your favorite uh hiking spot or or skiing trail or whatever it is right um so i do think there's some some stuff there um that makes it a little bit more subaru than maybe some other evs but in terms of how it drives you know gabe kind of alluded to it it's pretty good i was pleasantly surprised i don't think it's going to blow anybody away um now going back to that value proposition i do wish that maybe it came in a little cheaper because it doesn't really have the power or the speed of some of these other evs that you're you're seeing now that you just kind of expect them to have a lot of power a lot of torque it's about 215 horsepower i do think that it's enough where you get that electric instant torque sense but it you know you get a taste for that but it's it's not going to be anything too crazy in terms of steering handling i thought it was pretty good it is responsive it's predictable it has a nice weight to it you do benefit from that battery pack being down low it kind of hugs through the corners pretty well again nothing i don't think it's going to take anybody out of say a model y where it's really sharp handling really aggressive kind of ride um and and power not to mention power um but that being said it it does feel pretty nice to drive and i was happy to see that let me allude to the the price here because uh even though uh the merchandising between the subaru and toyotaro is a little different with the toyota you can start with the front wheel drive that's a little less less expensive on the bz4x uh the soltera already has an advantage with the name that you can pronounce and remember so uh now the other advantage is that the salt era qualifies for the federal tax incentive of 7 500 and the toyota only has half of that because toyota already used some of its credit with the prius and rav4 plug-in hybrids their credit uh gets is on in the process of being phased out so it goes into half so it's 37.50 right now and then at the beginning of 2023 it's going to go to another half of that so it'll be quarter of the 7 500 and then eventually it'll disappear complete completely another point alex made is about tesla and i think there is a certain type of buyer out there that has a bit of a disdain for tesla and the whole cult that that surrounds tesla and i think that subaru plugs right into that so i think that's uh another another asset probably yeah cars say something about their driver and and you're buying into something sometimes when you buy buy a car and i think just having a subaru badge on the front is going to attract people not just from tesla but over of the bz4x that subaru badge i think might be the the best selling point for this vehicle yeah it feels like a um an ev that you know it's for somebody who maybe wants to make the ev jump right but maybe it's for an environmental reason or other reasons you might have but they don't necessarily need like the latest and greatest and the flashiest and um maybe they kind of want a more conventional experience in some ways and they don't need the weirdness that kind of in quirks that come with some evs now in terms of like the controls and the interior layout and stuff like that um door handles door handles great point yes it's got regular door handles i think that's uh we all appreciated that after driving the ev6 but that interior though i gotta say that interior although parts of it are very similar to uh to existing gas-powered cars it one of the things that i like best about evs and tesla has done an awesome job with this kia and hyundai have done an awesome job of this volkswagen's even done an awesome job of this is that when when you remove things like the you know the transmission and the uh gas engine from where they need to be in a gas-powered car it opens up interior space and this car just doesn't do that it feels like i'm in this like 1950s le mans car where i'm kind of dropped into this cockpit and you know it's got that kind of 80s boombox look to it with a big you know uh you know the big chunky controls but some of them are are touch screens and i just personally i think it's i i find it personally i find it kind of an ugly interior i think it looks worse on the on the toyota with a sort of lower trim level that we got to drive but i i i know that if monty were here he would be talking about how how hemmed in the cockpit is on his knees and and how it doesn't have it doesn't have that room and i felt the same way i like a car that's kind of open and airy and and this car's interior doesn't take advantage and it's a purpose-built built ev i don't understand why it doesn't have that same open airiness uh and take advantage of the of the eevee design that that other eevees like the model 3 like the um ionic 5 have done so well there are certainly a couple of oddities about the soltero and the bz4x of course and uh i think the most striking thing is how far away the the instrument cluster is from you and uh at least for me when i sit in the car the steering wheel blocks a huge part of the cluster for me so information such as speed and range is not all that uh front and center for me yeah i think that that's probably one of the weirdest things about the car is the steering wheel cluster situation you know they most cars your design it's designed so that you look through the steering wheel right at your your gauge cluster this is designed so it's much further back first of all towards the windshield but then they they raised it up so it actually kind of pokes above the the dashboard which is unusual these days you don't see that too often uh in cars anymore so it blocks a little bit of your view but uh where it gets kind of unfortunate is you have to lower the steering wheel quite a bit so that you can look over or if you don't want to do that like you were saying gabe it's going to end up blocking um some of that that display so i know for me the the steering wheel had to be lowered quite a bit more than i would normally prefer so it's kind of in your lap a little bit but then also the the cluster itself the screen that they're using it it doesn't feel like they accounted for the fact that it's so much further away right the text is still the same size it would probably be if the cluster was much closer to you um and it's also not any brighter it doesn't have a shroud around it or anything like that so i noticed in in bright sunlight it was getting difficult to see and read and the small text doesn't help so um seems like they had this idea but then didn't quite uh you know master the implementation of it yeah it feels like a 2022 2004 prius you know some ways officer how how fast was i going i have no idea yeah i don't know um yeah uh it's all the way down there uh gabe um there are some other sort of electric car specific foibles um can you walk us through some of the things that there are some just some really odd choices i think in terms of charging yeah well first of all let's talk about the range so the range is about is just 222 miles which is about 40 or 50 miles less than some of the the more the the the competitors in the ev space which converge at around 270 miles um so whether or not uh that that's uh overly optimistic or uh or just conservative uh will we'll find out and uh also another spec that a lot of people are gonna probably not be to pay too much attention to is that the on-board charger is only a 6.6 kilowatt output uh so what's an onboard on-board charger you might ask uh every ev or plug-in hybrid has an on-board charger which think of it as a funnel into uh of the earth for the electricity from the wall into the battery the wider it is the more electricity it can take the narrower it is the more constricted the flow is so at 6.6 it's a little short of the norm which these days is around 11 kilowatts so what does that mean for you is that uh you're gonna be limited in terms of uh the kind of circuit you're gonna put your electric vehicle uh charger in your garage it's only gonna have to be on a on a 32 amp circuit so you're not going to benefit from any uh from a 48 amp for instance that will speed up your your charging at home at least um uh in terms of dc fast charging uh when you're on a long trip in public areas then the car is uh competitive and it has an acceptance rate of 150 kilowatt so so keep that in mind if you're not going to be using dc fast chargers which are are growing but they're not you know they're sort of few and few and far between compared to these um they call them i know tesla calls them destination chargers you know the kind of thing where you plug in overnight and the next morning your car's charged if you're planning on that while you're driving uh to kind of top off it might take a little longer so that's you know one other thing is uh that the the saltera and the pz-4x from toyota are just practically the identical car i mean they are so similar uh i mean we know that there are no suspension differences no other than the badges i mean they're more similar than the chevy and the gmc yeah and i think to that point gabe there are some things um that if you're an existing subaru customer a loyal subaru customer um driving one now just to be aware of going into this if you're thinking about the sole terra is there are some uh forward-facing toyota things that you'll notice when you drive the car so um the infotainment is one of them um toyota just redesigned their their infotainment system and it's found its way into both the bz 4x and the soltera it's this big 12 more than 12 inches display in the center um you know and we haven't tested it fully but it seems to respond well it's fairly simple to operate it it has some weird things about it where you have this giant screen but you can't look at two different things at once so you're kind of bouncing around all these menus and stuff but point being if you're used to subaru's existing system you're going to get something different in this car and same with some of the 8s features i noticed that in the soltera they're still using some of the toyota terminology so if you're used to some of the words that uh subaru is using for like their their um lane centering system and and things like that you'll notice that the the terminology is actually from toyota so just something to kind of readjust to um if you're hopping in this thing now one thing um i'll bring up real quick uh we got to see the bz4x and soltera at the new york auto show earlier this year actually and they had this nice kind of cut away right the body removed and you could see the the platform underneath that they're sharing and a lot of evs especially in the us where we have a an appetite for a higher range they'll really try to pack as big of a battery pack in the in the frame that they can you know really push it out towards the um towards the motors at the wheel and out to the side of the rocker panels when you look at the the toyota and the subaru they really left a lot of room around the battery pack so i just wonder maybe you know they're playing really conservative now uh maybe in the future they left room to increase battery size right it's not that the battery is terribly small but just the range that they're getting out of it is not all that competitive maybe you know that the vehicle starts doing well they'll they'll give a an option later for a larger battery pack or something like that but just an interesting thing i noticed looking at the the guts of the car that's that's pretty that's pretty interesting so yeah so we're going to get ours in pre-orders you can get you can pre-order one now um we're gonna get ours in in august or september so to test the one that we rented um uh was about fifty four thousand dollars it starts at about forty five thousand dollars and that's again before that seventy five hundred dollar tax credit so in theory you could get um an all-wheel drive subaru sultera ev for about 38 000 bucks um when when all is when all is said and done so that's that's not that bad compared to the average price of that that's the price where this really feels like it would be competitive to me is is that sub 40 you you know the the lack of range and power compared to others really you know makes more sense at that type of price absolutely so if you're thinking of trading in your existing subaru for a new subaru maybe it's maybe it's and you're thinking i kind of want to go electric it might be worth uh waiting for our our full our full review which should be out of a month or so after that um after we get ours in in the meantime check out our on our website uh john linkov wrote a first drive review of the soltera so yeah you'll you'll learn more exactly a bunch of good photos and everything else so uh on to questions or question uh a question from paul who sent it in to talking cars at icloud.com and you too should be sending your questions into talking cars at icloud.com paul asks my question is about how the short shortage of computer chips is affecting the car market is it reducing the number of cars made is it slowing purchases of some models since some car makers seem to drop certain options but still build new cars i saw an audi q5 on car gurus that had been listed for 73 days but is missing some significant features the listing says the car had a semiconductor shortage credit to presumably cover those missing features are other manufacturers doing the same this sounds like a question to me uh it sounds like a question for for gabe to start off with because you run our car buying program you're the one who tells us what cars we're supposed to go out and buy anonymously what dealers might know who we are and you know what price to get and uh and how soon to expect it so and you buy a lot of cars yourself too yeah we've been at it we've been experiencing the chip shortage on our own skin and we learned the hard way that you know some car introductions are delayed car that was supposed to be out in march is comes out in june so that's pretty common also some features are missing on cars for instance uh some bmws tell you that you're not going to get a wireless charging pad and uh on our bmw 230i for instance we it says right on sticker you get credit for not having a satellite radio so uh these are some of the implications uh about the chip shortage yeah um i alex do you think that you know that that 230i when we go to sell it do you think that someone's going to say oh it's missing the satellite radio can you give me like 50 bucks off do you think someone is going to hurt resale value when things are missing maybe not the satellite radio but some other cars have actually announced a gm had a while where they weren't selling right trucks with cylinder deactivation that hurt fuel economy uh some folks are talking about heated seats you know there are some some slightly more significant yes i think it depends on the car and the feature um but in thinking about this is an interesting question uh i think there's a short term and then a long term right short term i think it it probably would depending on the feature something like heated seats i know you know up here in the the northeast we all quite enjoy heated seats heated steering wheel things like that so if they were missing i could totally see somebody um you know passing on that vehicle because of that or or like you said asking for maybe a price discount or something um and same with the silverado with the cylinder deactivation you mentioned i could see you know you think you're going to get worse fuel economy that could totally influence your your decision um on the flip side though potentially and just the theory but maybe down the road depending on the vehicle if it's something like that that bmw 230 which might have some kind of enthusiast appeal when it becomes older and more classic later on maybe some of these features that make it simpler because they're missing um might actually increase the appeal uh something going back to the cylinder deactivation maybe it makes the vehicle a little more reliable simpler just has less going on potentially um probably more far-fetched but you know i think it's it's tricky too because at first as the chip was kind of coming to light it was automakers were saying okay we're going to leave this feature out we're going to leave this feature out it was very direct and you were able to understand what was being you know missing or whatever um as this goes on and ad nauseum it feels it's becoming less clear what's not being included right a lot of websites the dealer websites they just say things might not be included because of chip shortage contact your dealer for more information so um i think it might just get a little messy later on as to try to figure out what a car has doesn't have um just uh you know the information is not so clear i guess going forward absolutely paul had a question too about you know is it is it slowing purchases of some models um you know from from uh i i wrote about this sort of ben preston wrote about this a couple of us wrote about this for cr so if you search for chip shortage on on cr.org you'll find it but it's with some of the industry analysts that i spoke with said is is that automakers are kind of concentrating on the cars they can build they're sort of triaging their their to keep their production lines running uh to get the most profitable cars out so you're seeing maybe they're not going to build as many sedans because they would like to put those chips into suvs which are faster selling with higher margins you're going to see cars paradoxically sometimes cars with more features because that can pad those margins and be more profitable for the automaker um so yeah it it's sort of artificially slowing purchases on some models because they they're they're not building them uh as as much um so so absolutely you're gonna see some uh those bottlenecks making it to the model mix and and i think and and what some industry analysts have told me is that you know that those crazy high numbers for the average new car transaction price that can be you know that has a little to do with it too because they're the automakers are making those most profitable models they're not making as many of those those entry-level ones so interesting time to be buying a car uh interesting time to be making cars interesting time to be talking cars so thanks so much for talking cards with us today to find out anything more about saltera as gabe mentioned there's there's a first drive review online at cr.org there's a lot of information about the semiconductor shortage um there's also um articles about which cars are selling for over msrp and how much they're selling for over msrp and which cars you can get still get deals on even now in in 20 20 22. uh thanks for talking cars with us we'll talk again soonhey talking cars fans we're making plans for our 4th of july episode and we want to hear from you so we want to know what does it mean for a car to be considered america does it have to be built here come from a company based in the u.s what do you consider to be the most american vehicle of all time email or texted video talking cars at icloud.com and give us your definition of what it means for a car to be american and what you think is the most epic iconic american car ever we're gonna choose our favorite responses and include them in the podcast that's talking cars at icloud.com now onto the show hey welcome back i'm keith barry i'm alex isaac i'm gabe shanhart and this week we are talking about a a new electric car as as we so frequently are these days uh that we rented it is subaru's first fully electric vehicle uh it's called the soltera uh and it's it's based on a toyota uh but we'll talk about that later you know let's let's talk about the the car itself it's it's itself first and you know give it its due uh gabe subaru you know they haven't had a real electric offering before they've sort of had that that half-hearted plug-in hybrid for for a few minutes there and as um as the market goes electric and electrifies do you think this is going to keep subaru drivers in the fold because i can i can see i don't know about you but i know enough about the average subaru driver to to think that maybe there's some interest in electrification here subaru customers have been clamoring for an ev for a while and uh yes you mentioned the uh the token uh crosstrek uh plug-in hybrid but uh now uh again and again this is a collaboration between toyota and subaru and uh the solterra is uh plugs in right into that new modern uh new crop of evs that converge around fifty thousand dollars starting at about forty five thousand and uh it's it's an suv it's functional it's uh it has all-wheel drive and uh it can totally answer all the the needs and wants of uh of any subaru customer and uh we've experienced it you know it's the car is very pleasant uh i mean it's quick it's quiet it rides well it handles responsible responsively so uh i think uh subaru has a real a real asset on it on their hand here yeah uh alex you've driven it too um you know what what what do you what do you think in terms of because you know subaru's whole selling point is is all-wheel drive and that's sort of par for the course for evs and that sort of almost suv height it you know this it seems like a lot of companies can outdo subaru now that they're going electric uh what do you what do you think about about this can it can it compete yeah it it it kind of falls into a weird place i think um but there are some things about it that give it that subaru edge you mentioned the standard all-wheel drive most other evs you you do have to kind of go to a higher trim or option all-wheel drive specifically and we'll talk price later i don't i don't know that there's a price advantage here with the soltera that you're getting all-wheel drive for less money necessarily but another thing it does come standard with some off-road features it has subaru's x-mode which you know manages power to each corner a little differently um it also has some ground clearance that some of the other evs that it competes with like id4 and ionic five don't necessarily have it's about eight and a half inches which nothing crazy but it might be that extra we're not going to take it on the rock wall right we are not okay um yeah it's not quite there but it might have enough to get you you know down that trail to your favorite uh hiking spot or or skiing trail or whatever it is right um so i do think there's some some stuff there um that makes it a little bit more subaru than maybe some other evs but in terms of how it drives you know gabe kind of alluded to it it's pretty good i was pleasantly surprised i don't think it's going to blow anybody away um now going back to that value proposition i do wish that maybe it came in a little cheaper because it doesn't really have the power or the speed of some of these other evs that you're you're seeing now that you just kind of expect them to have a lot of power a lot of torque it's about 215 horsepower i do think that it's enough where you get that electric instant torque sense but it you know you get a taste for that but it's it's not going to be anything too crazy in terms of steering handling i thought it was pretty good it is responsive it's predictable it has a nice weight to it you do benefit from that battery pack being down low it kind of hugs through the corners pretty well again nothing i don't think it's going to take anybody out of say a model y where it's really sharp handling really aggressive kind of ride um and and power not to mention power um but that being said it it does feel pretty nice to drive and i was happy to see that let me allude to the the price here because uh even though uh the merchandising between the subaru and toyotaro is a little different with the toyota you can start with the front wheel drive that's a little less less expensive on the bz4x uh the soltera already has an advantage with the name that you can pronounce and remember so uh now the other advantage is that the salt era qualifies for the federal tax incentive of 7 500 and the toyota only has half of that because toyota already used some of its credit with the prius and rav4 plug-in hybrids their credit uh gets is on in the process of being phased out so it goes into half so it's 37.50 right now and then at the beginning of 2023 it's going to go to another half of that so it'll be quarter of the 7 500 and then eventually it'll disappear complete completely another point alex made is about tesla and i think there is a certain type of buyer out there that has a bit of a disdain for tesla and the whole cult that that surrounds tesla and i think that subaru plugs right into that so i think that's uh another another asset probably yeah cars say something about their driver and and you're buying into something sometimes when you buy buy a car and i think just having a subaru badge on the front is going to attract people not just from tesla but over of the bz4x that subaru badge i think might be the the best selling point for this vehicle yeah it feels like a um an ev that you know it's for somebody who maybe wants to make the ev jump right but maybe it's for an environmental reason or other reasons you might have but they don't necessarily need like the latest and greatest and the flashiest and um maybe they kind of want a more conventional experience in some ways and they don't need the weirdness that kind of in quirks that come with some evs now in terms of like the controls and the interior layout and stuff like that um door handles door handles great point yes it's got regular door handles i think that's uh we all appreciated that after driving the ev6 but that interior though i gotta say that interior although parts of it are very similar to uh to existing gas-powered cars it one of the things that i like best about evs and tesla has done an awesome job with this kia and hyundai have done an awesome job of this volkswagen's even done an awesome job of this is that when when you remove things like the you know the transmission and the uh gas engine from where they need to be in a gas-powered car it opens up interior space and this car just doesn't do that it feels like i'm in this like 1950s le mans car where i'm kind of dropped into this cockpit and you know it's got that kind of 80s boombox look to it with a big you know uh you know the big chunky controls but some of them are are touch screens and i just personally i think it's i i find it personally i find it kind of an ugly interior i think it looks worse on the on the toyota with a sort of lower trim level that we got to drive but i i i know that if monty were here he would be talking about how how hemmed in the cockpit is on his knees and and how it doesn't have it doesn't have that room and i felt the same way i like a car that's kind of open and airy and and this car's interior doesn't take advantage and it's a purpose-built built ev i don't understand why it doesn't have that same open airiness uh and take advantage of the of the eevee design that that other eevees like the model 3 like the um ionic 5 have done so well there are certainly a couple of oddities about the soltero and the bz4x of course and uh i think the most striking thing is how far away the the instrument cluster is from you and uh at least for me when i sit in the car the steering wheel blocks a huge part of the cluster for me so information such as speed and range is not all that uh front and center for me yeah i think that that's probably one of the weirdest things about the car is the steering wheel cluster situation you know they most cars your design it's designed so that you look through the steering wheel right at your your gauge cluster this is designed so it's much further back first of all towards the windshield but then they they raised it up so it actually kind of pokes above the the dashboard which is unusual these days you don't see that too often uh in cars anymore so it blocks a little bit of your view but uh where it gets kind of unfortunate is you have to lower the steering wheel quite a bit so that you can look over or if you don't want to do that like you were saying gabe it's going to end up blocking um some of that that display so i know for me the the steering wheel had to be lowered quite a bit more than i would normally prefer so it's kind of in your lap a little bit but then also the the cluster itself the screen that they're using it it doesn't feel like they accounted for the fact that it's so much further away right the text is still the same size it would probably be if the cluster was much closer to you um and it's also not any brighter it doesn't have a shroud around it or anything like that so i noticed in in bright sunlight it was getting difficult to see and read and the small text doesn't help so um seems like they had this idea but then didn't quite uh you know master the implementation of it yeah it feels like a 2022 2004 prius you know some ways officer how how fast was i going i have no idea yeah i don't know um yeah uh it's all the way down there uh gabe um there are some other sort of electric car specific foibles um can you walk us through some of the things that there are some just some really odd choices i think in terms of charging yeah well first of all let's talk about the range so the range is about is just 222 miles which is about 40 or 50 miles less than some of the the more the the the competitors in the ev space which converge at around 270 miles um so whether or not uh that that's uh overly optimistic or uh or just conservative uh will we'll find out and uh also another spec that a lot of people are gonna probably not be to pay too much attention to is that the on-board charger is only a 6.6 kilowatt output uh so what's an onboard on-board charger you might ask uh every ev or plug-in hybrid has an on-board charger which think of it as a funnel into uh of the earth for the electricity from the wall into the battery the wider it is the more electricity it can take the narrower it is the more constricted the flow is so at 6.6 it's a little short of the norm which these days is around 11 kilowatts so what does that mean for you is that uh you're gonna be limited in terms of uh the kind of circuit you're gonna put your electric vehicle uh charger in your garage it's only gonna have to be on a on a 32 amp circuit so you're not going to benefit from any uh from a 48 amp for instance that will speed up your your charging at home at least um uh in terms of dc fast charging uh when you're on a long trip in public areas then the car is uh competitive and it has an acceptance rate of 150 kilowatt so so keep that in mind if you're not going to be using dc fast chargers which are are growing but they're not you know they're sort of few and few and far between compared to these um they call them i know tesla calls them destination chargers you know the kind of thing where you plug in overnight and the next morning your car's charged if you're planning on that while you're driving uh to kind of top off it might take a little longer so that's you know one other thing is uh that the the saltera and the pz-4x from toyota are just practically the identical car i mean they are so similar uh i mean we know that there are no suspension differences no other than the badges i mean they're more similar than the chevy and the gmc yeah and i think to that point gabe there are some things um that if you're an existing subaru customer a loyal subaru customer um driving one now just to be aware of going into this if you're thinking about the sole terra is there are some uh forward-facing toyota things that you'll notice when you drive the car so um the infotainment is one of them um toyota just redesigned their their infotainment system and it's found its way into both the bz 4x and the soltera it's this big 12 more than 12 inches display in the center um you know and we haven't tested it fully but it seems to respond well it's fairly simple to operate it it has some weird things about it where you have this giant screen but you can't look at two different things at once so you're kind of bouncing around all these menus and stuff but point being if you're used to subaru's existing system you're going to get something different in this car and same with some of the 8s features i noticed that in the soltera they're still using some of the toyota terminology so if you're used to some of the words that uh subaru is using for like their their um lane centering system and and things like that you'll notice that the the terminology is actually from toyota so just something to kind of readjust to um if you're hopping in this thing now one thing um i'll bring up real quick uh we got to see the bz4x and soltera at the new york auto show earlier this year actually and they had this nice kind of cut away right the body removed and you could see the the platform underneath that they're sharing and a lot of evs especially in the us where we have a an appetite for a higher range they'll really try to pack as big of a battery pack in the in the frame that they can you know really push it out towards the um towards the motors at the wheel and out to the side of the rocker panels when you look at the the toyota and the subaru they really left a lot of room around the battery pack so i just wonder maybe you know they're playing really conservative now uh maybe in the future they left room to increase battery size right it's not that the battery is terribly small but just the range that they're getting out of it is not all that competitive maybe you know that the vehicle starts doing well they'll they'll give a an option later for a larger battery pack or something like that but just an interesting thing i noticed looking at the the guts of the car that's that's pretty that's pretty interesting so yeah so we're going to get ours in pre-orders you can get you can pre-order one now um we're gonna get ours in in august or september so to test the one that we rented um uh was about fifty four thousand dollars it starts at about forty five thousand dollars and that's again before that seventy five hundred dollar tax credit so in theory you could get um an all-wheel drive subaru sultera ev for about 38 000 bucks um when when all is when all is said and done so that's that's not that bad compared to the average price of that that's the price where this really feels like it would be competitive to me is is that sub 40 you you know the the lack of range and power compared to others really you know makes more sense at that type of price absolutely so if you're thinking of trading in your existing subaru for a new subaru maybe it's maybe it's and you're thinking i kind of want to go electric it might be worth uh waiting for our our full our full review which should be out of a month or so after that um after we get ours in in the meantime check out our on our website uh john linkov wrote a first drive review of the soltera so yeah you'll you'll learn more exactly a bunch of good photos and everything else so uh on to questions or question uh a question from paul who sent it in to talking cars at icloud.com and you too should be sending your questions into talking cars at icloud.com paul asks my question is about how the short shortage of computer chips is affecting the car market is it reducing the number of cars made is it slowing purchases of some models since some car makers seem to drop certain options but still build new cars i saw an audi q5 on car gurus that had been listed for 73 days but is missing some significant features the listing says the car had a semiconductor shortage credit to presumably cover those missing features are other manufacturers doing the same this sounds like a question to me uh it sounds like a question for for gabe to start off with because you run our car buying program you're the one who tells us what cars we're supposed to go out and buy anonymously what dealers might know who we are and you know what price to get and uh and how soon to expect it so and you buy a lot of cars yourself too yeah we've been at it we've been experiencing the chip shortage on our own skin and we learned the hard way that you know some car introductions are delayed car that was supposed to be out in march is comes out in june so that's pretty common also some features are missing on cars for instance uh some bmws tell you that you're not going to get a wireless charging pad and uh on our bmw 230i for instance we it says right on sticker you get credit for not having a satellite radio so uh these are some of the implications uh about the chip shortage yeah um i alex do you think that you know that that 230i when we go to sell it do you think that someone's going to say oh it's missing the satellite radio can you give me like 50 bucks off do you think someone is going to hurt resale value when things are missing maybe not the satellite radio but some other cars have actually announced a gm had a while where they weren't selling right trucks with cylinder deactivation that hurt fuel economy uh some folks are talking about heated seats you know there are some some slightly more significant yes i think it depends on the car and the feature um but in thinking about this is an interesting question uh i think there's a short term and then a long term right short term i think it it probably would depending on the feature something like heated seats i know you know up here in the the northeast we all quite enjoy heated seats heated steering wheel things like that so if they were missing i could totally see somebody um you know passing on that vehicle because of that or or like you said asking for maybe a price discount or something um and same with the silverado with the cylinder deactivation you mentioned i could see you know you think you're going to get worse fuel economy that could totally influence your your decision um on the flip side though potentially and just the theory but maybe down the road depending on the vehicle if it's something like that that bmw 230 which might have some kind of enthusiast appeal when it becomes older and more classic later on maybe some of these features that make it simpler because they're missing um might actually increase the appeal uh something going back to the cylinder deactivation maybe it makes the vehicle a little more reliable simpler just has less going on potentially um probably more far-fetched but you know i think it's it's tricky too because at first as the chip was kind of coming to light it was automakers were saying okay we're going to leave this feature out we're going to leave this feature out it was very direct and you were able to understand what was being you know missing or whatever um as this goes on and ad nauseum it feels it's becoming less clear what's not being included right a lot of websites the dealer websites they just say things might not be included because of chip shortage contact your dealer for more information so um i think it might just get a little messy later on as to try to figure out what a car has doesn't have um just uh you know the information is not so clear i guess going forward absolutely paul had a question too about you know is it is it slowing purchases of some models um you know from from uh i i wrote about this sort of ben preston wrote about this a couple of us wrote about this for cr so if you search for chip shortage on on cr.org you'll find it but it's with some of the industry analysts that i spoke with said is is that automakers are kind of concentrating on the cars they can build they're sort of triaging their their to keep their production lines running uh to get the most profitable cars out so you're seeing maybe they're not going to build as many sedans because they would like to put those chips into suvs which are faster selling with higher margins you're going to see cars paradoxically sometimes cars with more features because that can pad those margins and be more profitable for the automaker um so yeah it it's sort of artificially slowing purchases on some models because they they're they're not building them uh as as much um so so absolutely you're gonna see some uh those bottlenecks making it to the model mix and and i think and and what some industry analysts have told me is that you know that those crazy high numbers for the average new car transaction price that can be you know that has a little to do with it too because they're the automakers are making those most profitable models they're not making as many of those those entry-level ones so interesting time to be buying a car uh interesting time to be making cars interesting time to be talking cars so thanks so much for talking cards with us today to find out anything more about saltera as gabe mentioned there's there's a first drive review online at cr.org there's a lot of information about the semiconductor shortage um there's also um articles about which cars are selling for over msrp and how much they're selling for over msrp and which cars you can get still get deals on even now in in 20 20 22. uh thanks for talking cars with us we'll talk again soon\n"