VW ID.4: First Impressions

After a week with the VW ID.4, I’m still confident I made the right decision. Switching from a Tesla Model 3 was a big move, but the reasons were clear: I wanted more cargo space, a nicer interior, and to avoid the plummeting resale value of my Tesla. On top of that, I was tired of associating my car with Elon Musk. Every time I saw the news, I thought about selling my car. So, I finally did. Sanity restored. I think early on, the biggest takeaway for me is that I like having a car that happens to be electric, which is a bit of shift from the approach Tesla takes. There are a ton of features but everything tries to be too clever.

The Pros

Overall, I’m very happy with the way that the car feels in the interior. It’s not a luxury car by any stretch, but it just feels “nice”. It’s the little things that make a big difference. The normal door handles are a refreshing change—imagine, a door handle that works like a door handle! Revolutionary. The ride is whisper-quiet, and the added trunk space means I can actually fit things in my car without playing Tetris. Closing doors doesn’t feel cheap, things don’t squeak when you move, I haven’t heard rattles. I love the fully retractable sun shade, which is a godsend in the hot summer months in Georgia. The CarPlay integration is excellent, offering an infotainment system that doesn’t look like a webpage that the CSS failed to load. Having choice in mapping, music and more is so, so wonderful.

The screen layout in the VW ID.4 is actually practical, unlike Tesla’s, which devoted a third of its real estate to desperately convincing me I needed Full Self-Driving. I’ve got a smaller screen directly in front of me with range, speed, mapping and other relevant info so you don’t need to glance toward the middle of the car to get that info. As far as the ride goes, the ID.4 drives like an actual car instead of a rolling iPad, and switching between single-pedal and regular driving is a breeze—great for me, and a win for my wife, who would rather not be thrown into the windshield every time she takes her foot off the accelerator. Acceleration is fine, but not as good as the M3. Despite the spacious interior, parking isn’t bad, either. It takes a little getting used to between being higher up and such, but so far no real issues there.

Oh, and physical buttons! Well, sort of. More on that later.

The Cons

I expected some trade-offs with an early-gen EV, but some of these quirks are just plain unnecessary. Charging is noticeably slower, taking about 12 hours to go from 20-80% on a Level 2 charger, compared to about seven hours with my Tesla. I haven’t fine-tuned the settings yet, so maybe there’s hope. The range is also lower—around 220 miles per charge versus the Model 3’s 320—but let’s be honest, how often am I really driving across the country? Most of my driving is either under 5 miles or day trips with the family. Plotting a ~90 mile radius from our house (to account for round trip and arriving home with a little extra juice) makes any day trip in the north part of the state easy. I used a supercharger exactly 9 times in the 3 years I owned a Tesla, so this isn’t really an issue but the range is significantly less than my previous car. Time will tell if this gives me more range anxiety but I don’t anticipate it.

CarPlay is great, but the downside is that I don’t get that super-integrated charging network experience when using Apple or Google Maps. Not a huge deal given the fact that I only used it about a dozen times in 3 years, but it was definitely a strength of my previous car. Also, welcome back, key fob! It’s been a while. Single-pedal driving exists, but it’s not as smooth as Tesla’s. The app? It’s fine. It will graciously let me know if I left the car unlocked, but will it won’t let me do anything about it from the app. Better than nothing, but only barely.

And let’s talk about the buttons. VW had the right idea: let’s use physical buttons for a lot of the typical functions like climate control, play/pause, volume, TACC, etc. But then they decided to make them capacitive instead of, you know, actual buttons. There’s also no walk-away auto lock yet, though apparently, it’s coming in a software update.

A Note About Adapters, Tesla Wall Chargers, and Permissions

One unexpected snag was the charging compatibility. The ID.4 uses a CCS charging port, but I own a Tesla Wall Charger. Instead of replacing it (as almost any new EV will use the NACS charging standard), I opted for a TeslaTap – 50 AMP Tesla to J-1772 Adapter. When I first plugged it in, the car gave me the silent treatment—just a flashing white light, followed by a solid red one, which is car-speak for “figure it out yourself.”

After some frustrating troubleshooting, I realized my Tesla Wall Charger had a security setting restricting charging to specific Teslas. Once I reset the charger and changed the Access Control setting to “Any Electric Vehicle,” the ID.4 finally decided to cooperate. Problem solved, but not before a minor freak out of what the root cause might be.

Final Thoughts

Despite a few minor drawbacks (and a couple of head-scratchers), I’m really happy with the switch. I knew I’d be trading off some EV advancements, but given my actual driving habits, it’s not an issue. At the end of the day, I’ve got a car that feels like an actual car, not a tech experiment, and I’m not constantly reminded of a certain billionaire every time I get behind the wheel. That alone makes it worth it. I feel like as I learn more about how to get the most out the VW I’ll be even happier I made the move.

Adios, Tesla

About a week ago, I posted about my desire to wash my hands of Tesla ownership. I’ve had a Model 3 Long Range for about 3 years now, and generally speaking it’s been a very good car.

My criteria for an EV were mostly centered around a few fairly straightforward areas. One, I wanted something that reduced “range anxiety” as much as possible. An option that had access to a robust charging network and got good range on its own was very important to me. Secondly, I wanted a nice car but didn’t want to pay 100k for some of the options out there. At the time, Tesla was by far the best choice.

However, as I got to using the car daily, there was a lot that I didn’t like. I covered a lot of this in a previous post, but at a high level:

  • I despised the closed ecosystem. It doesn’t scale and makes it harder to use basic functionality. The software team at Tesla builds a 3rd party implementation of something like Apple Music, says “good enough”, and moves on to something else. All of the media apps are pretty awful. A basic CarPlay implementation is all I really want or need.
  • The car has general fit and finish issues – panel gaps, weird noises, etc. I notice every little bit of wind or road noise. In general, the car felt very cheap. Things rattle or squeak, and at the price one pays for a new M3, it’s unacceptable.
  • I don’t use superchargers as much as I thought I would. This means the “Tesla advantage” is smaller than I thought it’d be.
  • The “premium” connectivity package is anything but. It’s pretty spotty, coverage-wise and while I think I can hotspot my phone and connect the car to that, I still would have to pay the $10/month for a stripped-down Apple Music implementation as they only allow paying customers to use streaming services.
  • The trunk space was too little for my needs. Honestly, if I had a Model Y I’d be a bit happier with the car. Having a hatchback like the Honda Prolouge, IONIQ 5, ID.4 or the soon-to-be-released Rivian R3 is the sweet spot for me, space wise.
  • I want nothing to do with Elon Musk.

So, I decided to sell my car and buy a comparably priced used EV to hold me over for a few years, at which time I’ll evaluate the Rivian R3 vs the Honda Prologue and whatever else is out there at the time. I found a low mileage VW ID.4 that checks most of the boxes for me. Will I have some issues with it? Yeah, probably. But I’m happy to have a car that has the space, CarPlay and build quality that I want, with 100% less Elon.

Musk, Tesla, and Virtue Signaling

If you’ve been paying attention to the news, we’re witnessing an Elon Musk-led psuedo-coup. I’m not exaggerating here, the new administration and Elon Musk are creating a number of constitutional crises and it’s very, very serious. Every single time I drive, I think about Musk and what he’s doing. Every time I read about Musk and what he’s doing, I think about selling my car to rid myself of my “swasticar” as I’ve heard it called.

So here’s the thing: I’ve been thinking about selling my car for a while for a few reasons. First, I want something with a bit more cargo space. Second, the paper cuts of Tesla ownership (cheap quality, no CarPlay) have worn on me over the last 3 years and I just am not super happy with it overall. Finally, Elon Musk appears to be a fascist. As you’d imagine, I don’t want to support that or be associated with him at all.

But, it’s complicated! My car is paid off & I do 95% of my charging at home. Trading a 3 year old car in for another used vehicle is a headache, and I’d only be doing it to “stick it” to Musk. My plan when I bought the car was to drive it for about 5 years and then upgrade to something newer, as EV tech is still moving quite fast. Selling it sooner means I absorbed the largest part of the valuation drop without amortizing it across a few additional years. It also complicates the environmental story – buying a new car that has a high environmental cost means I’ve undone some of the good of buying an EV and my old car will still be out there.

Musk already has my money and nothing can change that.

However, the counter argument is that a sizable chunk of folks who are looking at EVs will no longer consider Tesla, and a lot of people who were already thinking about getting rid of their car now will do so. Ditto for folks whose leases are running out. That glut of cars will depress the resale value of my car when I decide to get something new, and it makes me worry that it’ll tank faster than cars typically do in the 5 or so year range.

As it currently stands, I’m weighing 3 options:

  • Hang on to my car for a few years. Maybe I’ll get one of those bumper stickers to do my virtue signaling
  • Sell my car for whatever I can get for it, lease a car that checks a lot of boxes for me like the 2024 Honda Prologue and figure out what to do in a few years.
  • Sell my car for whatever I can get for it, and buy a similarly priced ~3 year old EV like an IONIQ 5 or ID.4 that has the space I’d like and without the Musk I don’t.

Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion!

Using Pocket Casts Filters

A few weeks ago, a big Overcast update shipped and while I was mostly happy with it, I did find myself poking around Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts and Castro while I was waiting for the showstopper bugs to be addressed.

I’m no stranger to Pocket Casts – I’ve been using it on and off for over a decade due to it’s cross-platform nature, customization and great user interface. I love that I can play my queue on my Sonos speakers, on my phone, the web and really any device under the sun. However, out of the box it suffers from some of the same challenges that Overcast has when it comes to queue management. Listening to a handful of podcasts is pretty easy, but if you subscribe to a number of shows that you only selectively listen to, the noise can become an issue.

Castro’s got a great queue system where you’re presented with an inbox that you go through, adding to your list or deleting. It’s intuitive, fast and it learns from your habits. That got me thinking about if I could use the filtering system that Pocket Casts has to set up something similar. After a little bit of fiddling, I’ve mostly nailed it.

Setting up queue management in Pocket Casts

First up, I automatically add all of my favorite podcasts to ‘Up Next’, which is what Pocket Casts calls their queue, and have items in this list download by default. This is a per-podcast setting that you can edit.

I then created a new playlist of podcasts released in the past 2 weeks that I call “Inbox”, sorted by newest episode at the top. However, it does not show any podcasts that have been played or downloaded. That way, as soon as it’s added to Up Next and downloaded, it falls off this list.

Finally, I changed a global setting to automatically archive any podcast over 3 months old. That way, even if I don’t mess with the “Inbox” playlist and only play stuff that is auto-added to my Up Next queue, those old episodes will filter out eventually.

With this setup in place, I’m able to subscribe to all of the podcasts I enjoy and have the my must-listens automatically added to Up Next. The one thing I wish Pocket Casts allowed for is more customization of swipe actions. If it did, I could then quickly swipe away podcasts from the list to archive, or add to Up Next in the other direction. There are ways to accomplish this with other apps, but it is super intuitive with the powerful filtering system that Pocket Casts provides. If you haven’t tried the app in a while or at all, I highly recommend it.

Apple Maps on the Web

Yesterday, Apple announced that Apple Maps is now in beta for all to use on the web. By visiting the intuitively named https://beta.maps.apple.com URL, users can get most of the functionality that one could by using the native apps. It’s only available on a subset of browsers (Safari/Edge/Chrome on Mac, Edge/Chrome on Windows and Safari on iPad), the performance is kind of hit or miss, and some of the functionality is missing at the moment. However, the announcement mentions that there’s a roadmap to bringing more browsers into the fold as well as adding more functionality.

While I don’t anticipate this is going to put Google out of business any time soon, I’m hopeful that this does a few things. First, having this available on the web will hopefully drive more visibility into the hit-or-miss nature of some of the POI data on Apple Maps. I’m crossing my fingers that we see an improvement in the quality of data on the platform. Second, I want this to see this trend of Apple opening things up continue – even if some of it is mandated by courts. Third, competition is almost always a good thing. Giving users another choice beyond Google Maps should push both companies to improve their products.

Overcast Update: Mostly Great™

Overcast rewrite list.
Overcast rewrite nowplaying.

Big news in Apple podcast land. A new version of Overcast, my favorite Podcast app (and one of my most used apps), was released this week. Marco Arment, the app’s developer, wrote more about it this week on his site. It’s a multi-year rewrite to modernize the now 10-year-old platform, and it will allow him to use a lot of new technologies and development practices as a result.

So far, I’m very pleased with the UI updates – it’s familiar but modernized – but there are a lot of rough edges I hope Marco is able to iron out over time. Here are my initial thoughts on what I hope he addresses:

  • Relaunching the app after a while doesn’t take you back to the playlist you were on. Instead it takes you to the home screen. This feels like a regression from the previous version.
  • I can no longer swipe to the right to play items next. It’s now 3 taps away. I hope this can be re-added in some way.
  • When I play podcasts from the new “recent episodes” section, it appears to always stop after the podcast. I’d expect that podcast to be added to whatever your current playlist is so playback could continue.
  • I’ve noticed inconsistent playlist behavior – played podcasts are being displayed in playlists for a while before disappearing. Not always, but I’ve seen it many times so far. Sometimes the episode will disappear from the list after being played only to reappear later.
  • I wish I could customize what goes in the menu when you tap on a podcast or view an episode’s details. I never share podcasts but I use “go to podcast” very frequently.

One of the big selling points of this multi-year rewrite is that it will enable new features and more rapid iteration. I’m really excited to see what new goodies we’re in store for, and I’m also hopeful that at least a few of the items I called out above get addressed in the coming months.

Jurgen Klopp to Leave Liverpool

This morning I woke up and scanned my RSS feeds as I normally do. I didn’t anticipate watching a 30 minute video while getting my kids ready for school, but the news that Jurgen Klopp is stepping down at the end of the season became my focus. I wrote about my love for Liverpool in 2020, but it’s worth restating how much Klopp means to the city and the club. He completely transformed a massive club that had been underachieving for decades. His man-management, technical ability and leadership are all superpowers that make Liverpool one of the toughest clubs to play against and one that nearly anyone would want to play for.

Soccer has quickly become of those most important, least important things in my life, and I credit Klopp for a lot of that. Not sure any manager can step in and do what he did for the club, but I’m grateful that I got to experience it over the past decade. I just hope they can write the perfect ending to this story over the next few months. They’re currently first in the Premier League, in the Carabao Cup Final and still alive in both the Europa League and FA Cup. What an amazing opportunity.

Because I can’t write so good, I’ll leave you with these words from the great Roger Bennett:

Apple announces changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store in the European Union – Apple

From The Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store impacting developers’ apps in the European Union (EU) to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The changes include more than 600 new APIs, expanded app analytics, functionality for alternative browser engines, and options for processing app payments and distributing iOS apps. Across every change, Apple is introducing new safeguards that reduce — but don’t eliminate — new risks the DMA poses to EU users. With these steps, Apple will continue to deliver the best, most secure experience possible for EU users.

I love how Apple frames these changes as introducing risks to users. A few other items of note:

An Update On Personal Requests & Siri Media Intents

So, I feel kind of silly.

In a previous post, I called out an issue I was seeing where Siri was unable to play from non-Apple Music/Podcasts sources. This was something I was hoping that my kids could use to play audiobooks in their rooms, but it wasn’t working and the feedback was pretty sparse from Siri.

The primary cause had something to do with “Voice recognition not available” status I was seeing on my Siri devices in my home.

I did some reading and didn’t turn up much. That led me to believe that this isn’t widespread and is likely just some sort of misconfigured state that I can blow up and start over with. Turns out, that worked! The steps to getting this to work correctly were pretty straightforward:

  • Disable Siri on all relevant iOS devices
  • Disable Personal Requests in the Home app for relevant HomePod
  • Re-enable Siri on iOS devices, re-train it on your voice
  • Re-enable Personal Requests for HomePods, etc in the Home app

After doing this, I tried to ask a HomePod to play something from my Audible library. It worked! I also was able to play audiobooks from Apple Books & Audible from my son’s iPad.

Crisis averted.