In my opinion, navigation is pretty much the most useless functionality in a car infotainment system. Every phone comes with a navigation app that always has up-to-date maps and that gives precise and accurate spoken directions. My iPhone maps app works flawlessly. A decade ago the Apple maps app was crappy. Now it's great.

Charging stations are much less of a problem than people believe. But because of the high cost of high-voltage batteries I haven't bought an electric car so far and, as I said, I won't be until the technology matures somewhat. New battery chemistries are cheaper and more durable than existing ones, which is why I believe 5-10 years down the road electric cars are most likely be not only cheaper to operate and maintain but to buy as well.

I'm not one to repair my car myself anyway. I don't have the skills or the tools. Regardless of the power train modern cars simply require too much in the way of know-how. They have dozens of computers on them that talk to each other via a serial bus and you need advanced scan tools to get to the bottom of issues. All but the most rudimentary stuff is best left to professionals who can sometimes fail to fix some issues themselves, too. It's so easy for amateurs to make things much worse by trying to do stuff beyond their skills.

I prefer a quiet car because my normally quiet tinnitus gets worse during and after long journeys in loud cars. Our older car is a reliable workhorse that is surprisingly spacious for a small hatchback. But there's no way around the fact that it's a loud little shit box. The Lexus GS is way, way more comfortable. It's about 7-9 dB quieter. It's got a pretty awesome Mark Levinson stereo system with 17 speakers and the amplifier has almost a kilowatt of power, which translates into clear sound quality across the frequency spectrum with much less noise than the average car audio system. The bass in particular is much better. Because the car is much better soundproofed than my old car you don't need as high a volume to hear music or speech properly on the highway.