Pleiades arrives in style
I traded in my venerable Jeep Liberty for a new ride recently, a Subaru Tribeca. Subies are well known for their reliability and their AWD. The Tribeca is basically an overgrown outback – in fact the new outback looks alot like a Tribeca. After pondering my driving habits for a bit, I thought that an outback made sense. AWD, nearly 30mpg with a 4. Sadly, I just couldn’t stand to drive the 4 cylinder. Not after having a 6 in almost all of my previous cars.
This particular car has built in Navigation, rear DVD, etc. I picked up some IR headphones for it from Amazon for a paultry $12/each. They have auto off and sound pretty decent. I expect that I’ll be hacking the nav system a bit in the future. It’s got some annoying features and quite frankly, the brain behind the thing is a piece of crap in terms of usability. Example: to put in a destination that’s across the country, you must select the region, then input the address. The map data that came in the car is actually based on 2005 data sets. ugh. It’s truly a lazy programmer who can’t create a list of states and auto select a region of said states. I’m forgiving Subaru for the lame Nav system because I really, really like the car. (And I didn’t pay $4k to have it in my used car, unlike the poor sap who originally purchased the thing.)
Hey Subaru, need a consultant for the next gen nav system? That thing that Kenwood is sell you is horrible. My 6 year old Tom Tom is better than that!