Well, it is nice to be able to buy an (almost) new EV and to face a 10% inflation rate and a quadrupling of the interest on my house mortgage with a yawn.
I think it’s good to have a 30 year fixed and very low mortgage interest rate on your house, having refinanced three times in two years to chase the interest rate to the bottom. That, plus secure investments on a similar amount that are making exactly double the rate of return. It’s the most conservative fraction of money I invest, all tax on it is paid it and it could pay off that mortgage, but the bank loses money on it every month so there’s no point. That was the plan about five years ago, now in lasting effect.
I’m very happy with my health care and I’ll be continuing to arrange for that to be the case indefinitely. Doing so is a priority for me and happily I don’t need to talk about it, whine about it or politic about it. If I don’t like it, I change it. That costs about 3% of our current household income for the two of us. We pay cash for the cat’s healthcare 
Cars as I mentioned are a great way to waste money. I have three of them, but I don’t waste any more on them than necessary to drive two of them roughly 4000 km a month, plus having the third ready for a few car shows a year – which has been its only purpose for the 22 years I’ve had it. My wife’s little sports car is incidentally worth about the same as we paid for it in 2011. So you can dodge depreciation to a degree with cars, but that has to be an objective or it doesn’t happen. Being manipulated by those trying to drive your car buying behavior generally produces the opposite result.
Cars as I mentioned are a great way to waste money
I agree. I have bought new cars (mostly; the “Fast & Furious” Soarer was one exception) but I keep them for so long that in the end they owe me nothing. My £18k Celica (the classic one with the pop-up headlamps) was worth £500 after 15 years. But it would have made another 10 with some rust repairs.
The problem is that you can’t do this with EVs; they are too new and not trusted as they get old (past about 6 years).
France always has had a rather high standard of living which is puzzling to anyone coming from somewhere people struggle to make ends meet with much less taxation.
Probably top of the list is buying French at almost all costs. Anyone familiar with Socata will rapidly get the idea As soon there is a social change which changes this, the whole place will be on the skids because foreign companies will come in with a large broom (again, look at Socata’s parts business!). It is similar in Japan – they buy mainly their own stuff (actually I don’t blame them since Japanese products are of excellent quality).
Also not everybody in France has a decent standard of living. The, shall we say, relevant geographical areas, are readily visible from FL100, around the large cities. The participants in Liberté, égalité, fraternité are far from the whole country. Very tricky topic! But every developed country has the same problem (developing countries “don’t have the problem” since most of the participants have their money safely stashed in Switzerland 
)
The problem is that you can’t do this with EVs; they are too new and not trusted as they get old (past about 6 years).
A guy I work with is selling his Tesla Model S for $20K having just bought a new one for I’m supposing about $80K. That’s $500 a month in depreciation, for 120 consecutive months.
I think it’s great that the French build and buy their own stuff, not for any economic reason that benefits the French but because different cultures can produce different and interesting things to offer the marketplace of ideas. Then in that scenario we in the US can buy what we like from a diverse market, including interesting things that come from relatively low wage countries. The Italians used to do the same, selling interesting cars that few wanted for inexpensive Lire. It was great. Now they build mostly Fiats (some of them Fiats with Lancia and Alfa badges) but when possible drive boring German cars (or boring German cars with Seat or Skoda badges) which have themselves become like Japanese cars except for being lower in quality and of no interest to me personally. Yes, this works for the world as a whole but it provides few beneficial niches for the adventurous and resourceful consumer in ‘my world’.
Lots of Arabs in my area who lived in France for a while before moving on. They’re nomadic
The second most spoken language in France is Arabic.
Yes, just as everywhere else there are people in France who don’t have an above average standard of living and there are those who have a poor standard of living. However, there is a lot of help in terms of housing, help with clothing and food, both through charitable institutions and government benefits.
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité are a big part of the French way of life, even today.
However, you will be penalised if you do harm to others. You will not get benefits such as unemployment benefits if you have not worked for them or are not in education. In other words if you do not allow others the respect of liberté égalité and fraternité, you will not receive it in return.
It’s one of the reasons why many migrants would prefer to risk their lives and pay smugglers a great deal of money to travel to the promised land where the streets are paved with benefits and cash in hand jobs and free health care, rather than to seek asylum in France.
gallois wrote:
The second most spoken language in France is Arabic.
When I was working on a project with a major French company, I met quite a few people who originated from Algeria in 2nd generation. I was there several times during the unrests in the Banlieus where it was not too safe travelling on the Metro in some parts, or so we were told. We talked a lot about the troubles they had there and my friends were unanimous in their judgement: Either you work like hell or you are going to end up like those who burn cars rather than having a good life. I vividly recall some discussions we had and how surprised we were at our own prejudices on how to deal with them. 2 of them are still friends of mine, 10 years past the end of the projects and I hope I will have a chance to see them again. They were not any different, did not have privileged upbringings but they managed to gain a position where they made good money for themselves and their families. And they were a lot less sympathetic towards those who rely on subsidies and sit out in those places to wait for Godot…
Silvaire wrote:
I think it’s great that the French build and buy their own stuff, not for any economic reason that benefits the French but because different cultures can produce different and interesting things to offer the marketplace of ideas.
Particularly in the aviation industry, France has contributed tremendously in comparison to many others. The French aviation industry produced iconic airplanes like the Caravelle, Mirage, Falcons, the Mercure (which is the very close relative to the A320) and also Concorde (with the Brits), the Jodels, the Robins, Moranes, the list is almost endless. Sud Aviation, Socata, Avions Pierre Robin, Dassault, Thales, Gardan, Breguet…. sometimes a bit messy as companies changed and interchanged names and proprietors, often you need to research to figure out which company is called what these days and also quite a few times airplanes made the jump from one to the other quite unexpected.
But what an innovation. I sometimes think that many French designs paved the way for others to pick up on. Quite a few airplanes France developed are favorites of mine because they pushed boundaries, in no particular order: The Robin HR100, one of the first real “long range” GA planes which evolved over time into designs like the TB series and particularly the TB20, which combines comfort, speed and range. The (failed) Dassault Mercure which was picked up by Airbus to create the 320 series and which today is probably the most successful airliner ever. Dassault becoming one of the biggest names in both military and business aviation.
And more to the point of this thread: Cars. Citroen, Peugeot, Renault…. my first car was a Citroen Visa with 652cc, a development of the legendary 2CV engine but with electronic ignition and 50cc more made it a totally different beast. That car did what people are trying today: 3-4 l/100km for a true 5 seater with ample baggage space, a design which lives on in the extremely popular C3 series. The legendary Citroen DS: elegance, totally revolutionary technology, a league of it’s own in terms of comfort.
I remember a day in Dijon many decades ago, when I went to a Visa drive-in: Citroen showed a few of us a concept car which never saw the light of day but which had something to emerge a few years later on an airplane: A side stick and a table which came up from under the dash. That thing was decades ahead of everything which existed at the time. And in the true French way of intertwined companies, the side stick concept found it’s way onto the Airbusses. And who else then the French could come up with a concept which finally allowed their air crews to have a meal in style, even though it is widely disputed that this is the reason why Airbus “invented” the side stick.
When I worked with an airline operating a Caravelle, we had several captains on their 2nd career after getting retired from AF or Air Inter. I was reminded of that when @gallois mentioned the early retirement ages they had at the time. Pilots, train drivers and several more retired at around 50 and then went on to take “leisure” jobs where they made a pile on top of their pensions, many of them abroad. I saw a few of such people with Air Toulouse as well and also some folks who followed the Caravelles to Africa were ex French ATPLs. Some of those characters knew more about their airplane than today’s airline captains ever will… I vividly recall one of the captains who told us stories of the Autoland systems they had on the Caravelle on Aeropostale and how they found it’s way on Air Inter’s 11’s without anyone “knowing” about it, which explained why they landed in places where others went around… that is well before people were talking of CAT III landings. Or the “fog dispersal” system at Orly, which consisted of a bunch of jet engines to blow the touch down zone free of fog for landing.
Gallois got me thinking in this thread and I talked to some friends who work here but live in France, which is a strange concept to us as we also know some who do the opposite: Work in France and live in Switzerland for the lower taxes. He has got a real good point: Yes, they pay loads of taxes but they do get something in return. Their economy may seem “messy” to many of us who live in countries where “laisser faire” is not a concept we live by, but while companies may come and go at a faster rate and more confusedly than elsewhere, they still crack on producing great stuff without too much ado, one might even think that a bancruptcy in some cases is not more than a little hickup: So what, let’s found another company and carry on. I also recall discussions I had with friends in Geneva when Sarkozy tried to change pension ages and shut down the French railways as a result as the train drivers had no intention of letting go of their privileges…
It’s always easy to jump to conclusions over simple figures and numbers, but most of the time the story is much more than that. In the case of the Grande Nation this is probably more the case than of many others. Was it Mitterand who answered candidly to the question of why he thought France was getting away with a more or lest socialist system fully backed by their own people, when the others were struggling: “Well of course it works as long as nobody calls it socialist”.
As this is supposed to be a cars thread, here my take after the first week of owning a 2020 Toyota RAV 4, after driving a V6 Camry for the last 23 years.
After the realization set in that it would take considerable money to keep the Camry street worthy to Swiss “better than new” standards we started to deliberate what to do. My first hunch was going fully electric, which would have meant the Toyota bz4x. I took it for a test drive while they determined the fate of my Camry and liked it, sort of. However, I was quite irritated by all the warnings and cautions but primarily put off by the horrendous price. The bz4x is the proverbial nanny car, which treats you as necessary ballast but keeps blaring warnings at you whenever it feels like it. The top of that is a camera behind the steering wheel which follows your eye movement and generates a “WATCH THE ROAD” warning if your eyes try to glimpse the side mirrors or look around. Apart from that, there is a multitude of bing bing, bong bong sounds the whole time you are driving, telling you what it thinks you are doing wrong, accompanied with warning lights. I found this VERY annoying and massively distracting.
Apart, we had a talk or two to people who do own electric cars and they all said the same thing: If you can’t charge at home, forget it. Power at charging stations is up to 3x more expensive than at home and the consequence is that there is no saving whatsoever over a hybrid car, apart from the high purchase price. We also shied away from buying new because of the horrendous depreciation any new car takes the moment the ink dries on the sales contract.
Consequently we looked at various other models, but also decided not to go for something too old, as it would simply mean that we get the same problem with MoT and their aversion against anything older than about 10 years. In the end we settled on a 3 year old 2020 model of the RAV4 Hybrid with the “Style” package. The car had been used as a personal business car and was close to pristine but has 132k km on the clock. Pretty obviously it was a return from leasing, the company who operated it took delivery of new cars. Price was roughly half of the new price for the model. It is not a plug in hybrid but a conventional.
Before signing the dotted line, I checked out several reviews. One that stuck with me was “You hardly will buy a RAV 4 because it is the car you want to buy, but it will grow on you”. In other words, people don’t buy the RAV4 because it is their “dream car” but because it makes sense. I would have been looking for a newer Camry or something like this, but my wife finally wanted what she calls a “family car” in other words something with a HUGE baggage space. I suggested the Highlux, some of which were available at simlar prices, but sanity prevailed, apart from the fact that my neighbours would have killed me turning up in this monster and negotiating the parkings at ZRH airport would have been quite difficult in it.
The RAV4 features a 2500 cc gasoline engine and 2 electric motors, which run the 4-wheel drive. It has 5 nominal seats and stands quite high, which is nice if you have to get in and out in my age. The “Style” variant has some neat creature comforts such as heated seats and steering wheel, heatable front and back windows as well as mirrors (no need to scrape off ice) and faux leather seats. In terms of comfort it is a far cry from the Camrys real leather fully electric seats, but they are tolerable. The drivers seat is electric, while the passenger seat is not. There are a total of 3 USB charging ports as well as one cigar lighter port in the front and 2 USB ports in the rear. There is also one CLP in the baggage area, which is practical if you want to use a mobile cool box or something like that.
The controls and buttons are pretty conventional. Air Condition, heating, the different window heats e.t.c. don’t need a computer science degree but can be switched via normal switches. Also the basic driving functions are quite conventional until you start messing with digital assistants. The car is “keyless” which means all you have to do is carry the remote control with you but there is no ignition key but a power button. The car locks and unlocks via hidden touch spots. An interesting feature in the back is a foot sensor which allows to open the trunk by giving a good kick under the back bumper, probably invented by someone who was not an enthusiastic shopper and wanted to vent his feelings when carrying the bags back to the car. But it’s practical.
Entering the car, you need to belt up and press the brake pedal before pressing the power button to get the car to start up. It takes about a minute for all the systems to come online, during which you get a first idea of the bing bing and bong bong you’ll hear for the rest of the drive. While thankfully there are no voice warnings and the nanny functions don’t go anywhere close to the bz4x, there is still loads of MiL functions which do away with the need for a back seat driver… Once the car had decided it’s ready to go, it sais so in green on the dashboard. Only then can you move the gear stick out of park and start driving.
The car has 3 preset driving regimes, selectable via a turn knob on the center pedestal. ECO suggests that it is the most saving mode. What it does is it regulates the engine control to soften responsiveness and to save electricity wherever it can, also by limiting heat and air condition to a minimum. In ECO mode, it will take a lot longer for the car to heat up or (probably) cool down in summer. If you select eco mode, the speedometer turns green. Normal mode is, well, normal and there is a sports mode which throws overboard all savings and tries to coax a sporty feel out of this truck. I’ve not yet used either but stayed in Eco all the time. There is also an eco monitor, which is some sort of video-game indicating how ecologiclly you are driving. The goal is to reach 100 points, but mostly I ended up in the 70ties or 80ties. The logic escapes me so far, will need to read up more about it.
So far i’ve done two larger test drives of about 100-150 km with mixed motorway and normal streets. In Eco Mode, the car has a consumption of about 6 l /100 km with only myself on board. For a hybrid, that is a lot and quite disappointing, given that the commercial claims consumption of 4-5 liters. And while it is an approximately 30-40% improvement over the V6 Camry, it is far away from being a real economical car. On motorways, consumption can go back to about 5.5 liters temporarily. I have not been able yet to verify those values, as the indicator is not a direct fuel flow gauge but rather some sort of statistical display. What I also found is that driving noise is quite horrendous. The car is much louder in the cabin than the Camry has been.
Like all new cars, this one comes with loads of “assistant” systems which are supposed to make your driving easier. I have VERY mixed feelings about them at this stage. The car has adaptive cruise control, speed limiter, lane keeping assistant and several other features. Apart from that, it has cameras which try to figure out road signs and give information about the current speed limits with varying success, as well as radar which determines the distance to the car in front. It also has some sensors to check on traffic around you and parking sensors, as well as (in my case) back cam. The idea of all those assistant systems is to increase safety.
After trying them out over the last week, I have mixed results.
In General, the “nanny” systems are nothing really to write home about, apart imho from the adaptive cruise control with it’s radar. Everything else is hugely distracting and unhelpful. It compensates the “gain” in safety by taking way too much of the drivers attention trying to manage cautions and warnings, not unlike an airbus gone rampant. Only on an airbus, you have someone to read the checklists and to interpret this stuff while the other one flies, here it’s up to you to cope with the never ending influx of mostly fake warnings. The saving grace is that you can actually switch them off. In newer models, where this garbage becomes standard and EU requirement, apparently you can not, as we found in the bz4x.
What is ok is the rear view camera. What makes it different from the $20 Wish cam I had installed in my Camry is the prediction in connection with the steering wheel. The cam is great to park but also absolutely needed in tight spaces. It’s picture quality however is rather mediocre also it appears to be located in a space, where it is not protected against spray and moisture. So if it’s raining, before you park, you have to get out of the car to clean the cam.
I left the worst for last. The entertainment system/Navigational system is based on a 7" screen in the center. And this is the biggest let down of the otherwise pretty nice car.
*There is a DAB radio, which I have not tried, as I do not ever listen to the radio. It appears to work fine though.
*There is no CD player.
*The navigation system is totally outdated and pretty useless. If you are used driving google maps, which gives you up to date information on the traffic situation, you will find yourself transported back in the early days of TomToms and similar devices. The system requires a subscription to update the maps once every couple of months, it has no connection to the outside world for traffic info unless you carry a hotspot and connect the car permanently to the internet. Even then there is maybe 10% of the information Google Maps show. In other words: useless and for nothing.
*Pairing the phone is working via bluetooth and appears to work fine.
*If you wish to communicate via other software such as Whatsapp e.t.c or use google maps, you need to run Android Auto. In this setup, Android Auto requires a cable connection!! Even with that, it frequently goes black screen and restarts. Com programs don’t work at all or only in a dumbed down version, which may again cause more accidents than it prevents. While you can talk via Whatsapp, you have to open a call ON THE PHONE rather than on the screen or per voice command. The sytem also will tell you if new messages have arrived but won’t show them but offers to read them.
*Because you need to connect your phone by USB, there is no way to connect a MP3 player or an USB-CD player to make up for the missing CD drive. Apparently people run music from their phones, but that prevents the use of google maps.
All in all, I found the system extremely badly designed and unusable.
The maybe worst thing of the whole center screen systems is that it can’t be switched off an also prevents attachment of a phone holder.
One positive thing I found is that the car is not permanently online, like some Teslas and other big brother cars are. So while it keeps nagging at you, it doesn’t call the police by itself and it also keeps most information to itself at the moment. Of course the problem with that is that in order to get connectivity for Nav or Radio systems, you need a separate access point.
In conclusion: The RAV4 is a nice family car with a few gadgets, which are partly useful but mostly distracting and imho at least in part a safety risk rather than prevention. It is reasonably comfortable. Fuel consumption is rather high for a hybrid. Navigation and entertainment is unusable.
The comparison to the 1997 Camry is rather frustrating: The Camry was much more comfortable to sit in, it drove quieter thanks to the 6 cylinder engine, it was better insulated against noise and it had none of the nonsense systems the RAV 4 has. Would I buy it again? I’d say the jury is out on that. But seeing what else is available, it appears that most cars these days are similar. So maybe that reviewer was right and it will grow on me. If so, it has a lot to catch up.
Hopefully the Rav4 will work out as a practical family car for you.
I had a 2023 Camry SE as a rental car recently and it was comfortable, spacious, quiet and smooth, without too much annoying technology. The only downside was it was a bit underpowered with 2.5L petrol, so the V6 model like yours would be the answer (at the cost of some economy). I would buy one, but agree that cars have become increasingly homogenised.
For me what’s interesting about a car is the driving experience plus the utility, I’m not into ‘features’ and that has led me to some unusual cars: my favorite of all time was a four door 3 liter Alfa 75 (Milano Verde for the US market) which I bought five years old and hardly used for $7200 and proceeded to drive it every day and maintain it for ten more years. I then sold it for $4000 with 200K miles, and I miss it to this day.
We had dinner last night with a friend who’s bought a Porsche Taycan EV, which is also (oddly enough) a nice driving four door car, with room for four. The performance is huge but the range is ridiculously low – 250 miles or something like that. I asked our friend how he manages with a car like that and not unexpected answer was that he drives only 2000 miles a year total and uses his wife’s Kia SUV to make any trips. The Porsche is still just a toy despite its interesting packaging of four people, and something to park outside his German themed business, which makes it a tax write off. The beauty of a car like that should be (to me) the combination of utility and driving fun but despite promising packaging it has little utility, and it doesn’t provide a terribly visceral driving experience either for $150K or whatever it costs.
Capitaine wrote:
I had a 2023 Camry SE as a rental car recently and it was comfortable, spacious, quiet and smooth, without too much annoying technology. The only downside was it was a bit underpowered with 2.5L petrol, so the V6 model like yours would be the answer (at the cost of some economy).
Well, my V6 was from 1997. But it did something like 8 to 12 l/100km which is not bad for a V6. The RAV 4 now does 5.5 to 6 l/100 km, which is, optimistically speaking, half of that and it’s a 2.5l engine too, but that one only charges the batteries. The whole power train goes via electric engines. I have to say that the acceleration is quite impressive, if you put it in Sports mode. On the other hand, it was fun to be able to experience the Camry on alpine roads up at 8000 ft altitude when most cars were struggling and it effortlessly managed to climb those passes we have. I will be very interested to see the difference here, as in theory, the electric motors should not even feel the altitude effect.
Capitaine wrote:
Hopefully the Rav4 will work out as a practical family car for you.
Oh I am sure it will. It’s the proverbial family van/SUV, particularly for our family of 3. It has ample baggage space too.
Turns out they had a bit of a break down in communications at the dealership… they forgot to update the software and maps, so the car has to go back for a day next week. Maybe that explains some of the problems we had.
Silvaire wrote:
The beauty of a car like that should be (to me) the combination of utility and driving fun but despite promising packaging it has little utility, and it doesn’t provide a terribly visceral driving experience either for $150K or whatever it costs.
I agree. I put some 500 km onto the RAV4 now trying to figure it out fully and to get used to it before the wife comes back from her holiday and while I have some qualms it is a fun car to drive. Of course I could also simply disable all the schnickschnack but somehow my interest in electronics keeps me curious what can be done once I understand it all (and its updated!). So far I’ve only driven it in the low lands around Zurich but I will be curious to see how it does in the Alps. The RAV4 series certainly has not become the most popular SUV around for nothing. Lots of taxi companies use them too, which is always a sign for reliability and durability. Also so far the goal has been technical and proceedural to figure out it’s eco modes and how to drive it the most economical. The fun parts of what it can do comes later.
Silvaire wrote:
I miss it to this day.
I can imagine. Having only owned a total of 4 cars to the ripe age of 60, I do miss all of my former cars. It’s funny: The first one was a 650cc Citroen Visa Club. That thing was the most efficient car I ever owned: It used 3-5 l/100 km with its 2 cylinders. And it showed brutally what happens if you put a proven engine design and add electronic ignition: The Visas engine was an improved 2CV engine but with electric ignition and 50 cc more it felt like a totally different car. It did 130 km/h on the motorway easily (ok, not uphill, but level or downhill) and never let me down even in our mountains. Then followed 2 Camrys, the first a 2.0 liter the 2nd one the V6. All of them did great and I fully expect the RAV4 to do so as well.
There is a lot of this going around
