A parking brake stopped a $100,000 van this week. Rich Rebuilds got a Rivian-built Amazon delivery vehicle powered up, heard the coolant pumps kick in, measured the cabin heater doing its job, and watched the dash finally read ready. Then the screen told him driving was disabled and pointed at the park brake system. Whatever else is wrong with that van, stored energy is not the constraint. Authority is.
That is the line running through today's five. In each one, something other than the hardware decides what the owner is allowed to do, and the useful question is not whether the software is clever but how easily its decision can be reversed.
Eon Next is selling the friendly version. Its Next Optimize tariff, built with the Australian firm Amber, hands the scheduling of a home battery to software that reads wholesale prices, a solar forecast and the household's own habits, then imports and exports without being asked. Dave, the customer in the film, says he spent his first weeks trying to break it and has overridden it exactly once, to confirm that he could. That is the shape of the bargain: surrender the decision, keep the veto. Amber says it now automates roughly 60,000 batteries in Australia and runs vehicle-to-grid with about 50 customers, heading for a thousand within a year.
The less friendly version arrives as a ceiling nobody asked for. Doug DeMuro's C-HR makes nearly 340 horsepower and reaches 60 mph in the fours, and its drive mode buttons offer eco and snow. Subaru's Uncharted, The Electric Viking reports, still has no phone app in Australia, so a car capable of 22 kW AC charging cannot be told to start a session from the kitchen. The MSI charger is the counterexample worth noticing. It adjusts from 6 to 60 amps in software, gates access with RFID cards, and because it is OCPP compliant the owner can point it at somebody else's app entirely.
Rich Rebuilds' van is the same idea with the covers off. What finally woke it was a high-voltage cut loop, the connector a firefighter is meant to pull, which somebody had unplugged and left sitting in the door pocket. One plug, and a six-figure vehicle reads as scrap. Then the software took over and produced a screen full of fault messages, a request for a code to drive, and a key it would not acknowledge. A fleet vehicle is built to obey its fleet. Bought privately, that becomes the defect.
Here is the test worth running before the next purchase. OCPP compliance is the small print that decides whether a charger bought in 2026 still does what you want in 2031, and almost nobody shops for it. Ask the same question one rung up: what will this vehicle, battery or charger refuse to do, who is able to change that, and does the answer require a dealer, an app that has not launched in your country, or a plug under the floor that a technician disconnected two owners ago.
Toyota's Electric C-HR Costs More Than the Bigger One
Doug DeMuro's review of the 2026 C-HR keeps circling back to where the car sits inside Toyota's own showroom. It shares a platform with the bZ, formerly the bZ4X, but is more than a foot shorter. It also costs more. DeMuro puts the C-HR at around $38,500 to start against roughly $36,500 for the bZ, says the larger car offers sub-200 horsepower trims the C-HR does not, and quotes the bZ at up to 315 miles of range where the C-HR does not reach 290.
The generational jump is not in doubt. The gas C-HR made 144 horsepower and needed 11 seconds to 60 mph, per the review; this one is quoted at almost 340 horsepower and does it in the fours, with all-wheel drive standard. DeMuro's complaint is that the speed arrived without a chassis to match it, and without a sport mode: the drive selector offers eco and snow. He also notes there is no glove box and no front trunk. His DougScore comes out at 49 out of 100.
For price context, The Electric Viking's figures for the Subaru Uncharted put the front-drive US Premium at about $36,000 including destination and the 338-horsepower Sport at around $41,000. The C-HR lands between them with, on the numbers DeMuro reports, less range than its own bigger sibling.
Eon Next Wants Your Battery to Trade While You Sleep
The Everything Electric team travelled to Peterborough to look at Next Optimize, an Eon Next tariff built with Amber, the Australian company running a similar product there. The pitch is that a household with solar and a battery stops being a consumer and starts trading. Eon Next's representative explains that wholesale prices move on a daily pattern, a small morning peak and a large evening one, and that the value comes from shifting energy outside those windows. The engine underneath, called Smart Shift, takes the wholesale price curve, a solar generation forecast and roughly 30 days of learning about the household, then schedules imports and exports itself.
Dave, the customer profiled, has 16 panels rated at 6.4 kW, a home battery, an EV and a charger fitted a year ago. He is an accountant, and says he set out to break the system and has not managed it. Amber's representative says the company automates around 60,000 batteries in Australia, covers 80 to 90 percent of the battery market there, and runs vehicle-to-grid with about 50 customers, expanding toward a thousand over the next year.
The film leaves one thing unasked. Arbitrage means extra cycles, and nobody addresses what harder cycling does to a battery warranty.
The Amazon Van's Battery Reads Fine. The Park Brake Does Not.
Rich Rebuilds bought a Rivian-built Amazon delivery van from a lot near Boston. The video's title puts the price at $10,000 against a $100,000 vehicle, and the host says he was told it had been through the lemon law process, returned to Rivian more than once, and was suspected of needing a new battery pack. He says it arrived on a trailer in neutral, with no title.
His diagnosis runs the other way. The 12-volt battery read 5.59 volts, and replacing it changed nothing, because a high-voltage cut loop, the connector a firefighter pulls to isolate the pack, had been disconnected and left in the door pocket. Reconnected, the van wakes with a long list of faults. A full reset clears most of them and the dash reads ready, but driving stays disabled with a park brake fault. The pack reports 60 percent and 99 miles, the cabin heater draws high-voltage power and works, and the range figure ticks down by a mile as it runs, which he treats as evidence the battery management system is reading correctly.
The warning here is not the pack. It is everything around it. He reports finding almost no service documentation for a vehicle built for a single fleet, and the van asks for a code to drive before it will move. A buyer should also weigh what the video does not: a healthy battery is worth little on a vehicle that cannot be titled and registered for road use.
State of Charge Froze MSI's New Charger and the Connector Broke
Tom Moloughney's condensed review covers the MSI EV Premium, a hardwired 60-amp unit listed at $649.99 that can deliver 14 kW and adjusts from 6 to 60 amps through its app. The specification reads well: a 24.6-foot cable, a 7-inch display, an IP55 enclosure, two RFID cards, Energy Star certification, a five-year warranty and true OCPP compliance, which lets the owner pair it with third-party software instead of MSI's.
Then came the cold. In the State of Charge weather test the unit is frozen for 24 hours at minus 12 degrees Fahrenheit and the connector dropped five times onto concrete from waist height. Moloughney reports the connector broke on the second drop, and the cable, measured at 23.3 mm and the thickest he has tested, was too stiff to work with. It failed both cold tests while passing the 120 degree heat and automatic restart tests, finishing at 83 points, or 4.15 stars.
The odder finding is pricing. The 40-amp plug-in version costs $699.99, fifty dollars more than the more powerful hardwired model, and scores 3.8 stars. Hardwiring needs an electrician, so a plug-in premium is not absurd by itself, but buyers paying it are also giving up power. He also lists no load management and no power sharing on either version, which matters most in a two-EV household on a tight electrical panel.
The Uncharted's Best Number Is 22 kW, Not 522 km
The Electric Viking spent two weeks with the Subaru Uncharted, including skid pan running at Queensland Raceway, and calls it possibly the best-handling small electric SUV he has driven. In Australia, he says, it comes one way, a dual motor all-wheel drive car at $59,990, which he converts to roughly US$39,000. That buys 252 kW, a quoted 0 to 100 km/h of 5 seconds, a 75 kWh CATL NMC pack and a WLTP figure of 522 km. He measured 16.7 kWh per 100 km against Subaru's claim of 16.
His most interesting argument is about charging. DC peaks at 150 kW for a 10 to 80 percent stop of around 30 minutes, which he treats as adequate rather than fast. AC is 22 kW on three-phase and he measured close to it, where he says most rivals stop at 11 kW. On a tariff where prices swing, that doubles how much cheap energy the car can absorb overnight, and he argues it matters more than a DC figure most owners use every few months. The catch is that three-phase installation cost him about $4,500.
The efficiency number is worth sitting with. When nexusEVnews covered CarSauce's Uncharted test, that reviewer could not better 20.3 kWh per 100 km. Two testers, one car, a gap wide enough to change the range maths.
Bottom line: The Eon Next model is the one to watch, and not because trading energy is novel. It is the only product here that treats the override as a feature rather than an afterthought. Toyota built a 340-horsepower car and hid the fun behind eco and snow. Subaru shipped 22 kW AC charging into a market with no app to schedule it. MSI built a charger that talks to anybody's software and then snapped in the cold. Buy the thing you can still control in five years. That list is shorter than the spec sheets suggest.
Commentary on third-party videos. Figures and claims are as presented in the sources and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.