Maple syrup in coffee is a bad idea

My God. This is awful. In my mind it should've worked. My quite bitter alcohol free (as I like to call my caffeine free coffee) cup of joe tasted a bit bitter and hollow. A little dash of the sweet tree sap would fix that, I thought. And why wouldn't it. It works wonders on coffee based desserts. But it turns out, it doesn't do the same in warm shitty coffee. I'm still finishing it, though. I'm built that way.

Maybe I just should've started with a better coffee bean. Made the coffee with some better water and some more care. It would probably have resulted in a very tasty cup. Just the thing I needed at this time. But alas, I tried to fix a thing that was never going to work anyway. No matter how much maple syrup I could've poured in the cup. I started out all wrong. I didn't do what I actually wanted and ended up with something meh. Not bad, not great either. Something I'll never brew again, that is for sure.

This, my dear reader who is actively questioning where the F this is going, is something I'm seeing happening on a way larger scale in the car business. We're all going back to the drawing board to start over. This time in the right direction to get to the stuff we actually wanted all along. Not the stuff we kind of felt like could hopefully make us similarly happy.

The latest example is Polestar. Today I wrote an article about the 4, a car I kind of liked, but didn't get. You see, the Polestar 4 is a electric SUV with a roofline of a coupé. Which is fine, but the designers found it necessary to make extra room for the heads of the people that would take place on the back seats. A noble endeavour for which a rear support beam neaded to be moved a bit more backwards. That in turn, as Polestar still sticks to, resulted in not enough space to fit a rear window, so it had to go. Replaced by camera's and a screen, which was fitted in the rear view mirror.

Well, as it turns out, that was pretty much BS. Polestar is building a 4 with a rear window and a different roof line. Why? Because it can, I guess. But the point is, Polestar could've started out with a 4 with a window and a different roofline which would've provided ample headspace for the tall people in the back.

Instead they removed a thing and added something else and hoped it would make us similarly happy with the end result. It didn't. It was a bit meh all round. I mean, I got used to the whole thing after a couple of day driving it around, but to this day I still don't get it. Starting off in the wrong direction with a half baked idea and some unnecessary tech to make it work, didn't end up with us in the right place.

Another thing is door handles. China is outlawing the disappearing ones, because of safety issues. I truly get that, but I don't get how we ended up with the things. Yes they are aerodynamically better, but some clever engineering could've fixed the range losses of handles that weren't perfectly flush with a door.

We started out with the problem of needing more aerodynamically sound doors, but tried to solve it in the wrong way, by pretty much removing them and making them much more complicated. We ended up with a thing, that if we added it to an already cool thing, it would make an even cooler thing. It didn't.

And I can attest to that. My Volvo EX90 wouldn't open the doors for me one day. It took me about half an hour to figure out why: the batteries of the keyfob (which doesn't have a metal spare inside it) were dead. Resulting in finding the plastic NFC-card to open the door, only to find out that the car wouldn't start, because the card wasn't enough and the car needed a key, which it couldn't see because the batteries were dead. Just give me a key and a mechanical door handle.

We could talk about buttons too, but I feel like I'm mentioning those things too much already. But you get my point. Adding a possible good thing like, Maple syrup to a bad thing, like shitty old coffee, to hide the fact you started out all wrong, won't make you happy. It will make you have diarrhoea. Probably. I can feel the bubbling already.

Knowing I could've avoided this, only makes it worse... Shit.