I applaud you for not taking the bait on the Model 3, which is overrated, but I cannot fathom purchasing an appliance car like a Camry. You can’t possibly enjoy driving it. Why not at least a Honda?
Personally, I’ve never driven a Camry and thought, “this is awful”, but rather “this is totally fine and wow, great mileage!” In a similar vein, its status as an abundant vehicle with many parts out there and being generally reliable are all similar and useful things I’d consider before buying a new washing machine or whatever.
I now drive a 2000 4Runner that has actually gone up in value from when I bought it 12ish years ago. I’ve had two people in the last two years drive by randomly and ask if I was selling.
One of my all-time favorite Onion headlines: Toyota Recalls 1993 Camry Due To Fact That Owners Really Should Have Bought Something New By Now
https://www.theonion.com/toyota-recalls-1993-camry-due-to-fa...
If you are struggling to build your self-worth through a car or think you need to spend $50k to get that, try fixing an old Camry yourself for dirt cheap, and then see how you feel. No need to fight for right-to-repair laws either, just buy a part anywhere and clean or replace it according to the manual, which is just a 1000 page PDF on the internet of every possible repair. (Although my next car will be electric, because of climate change. Sorry Camry.)
You can already buy random EV parts online. As automakers make more models and source more common parts for their cars to do this competitively, this aftermarket gets better and more useful. A fairly promising thing is the apparent popularity of EV conversions and home-brew EVs, so perhaps there will be some competition for e.g supplying full-on computer control systems with some serious capabilities. There are also more modifications people will conceivably want to do on their cars. I know someone whose petrol ute has a fridge under the canopy, powered by a solar panel on the roof and an extra battery. Nobody is out there drilling a hole in their iPhone to add a headphone jack, because it would be really bad, but you can do all sorts to cars without ruining the whole experience. The complexity and variability of what people want their cars to do leads to modifications and that demand will have to be met somehow. It's also the kind of strange demand that cannot be met by the big automakers alone.
As for reliability, I hope the market will continue to speak pretty loudly with their wallets on the importance of that. People care about it now, I have no reason to believe they'll stop.
In replay of the recent election in Aus.
There are a lot of high mileage Teslas out there. Most of Tesla's negative reputation seems to be people complaining about fit and finish (paint, panel gaps). The actual mechanical reliability seems to be quite higher than a normal ICE car. However EVs are still pretty new so long term data is still being collected.
http://www.truedelta.com/car-reliability
But Tesla still sells well for other reasons, so apparently they don't have to care about product quality.
The writeups of high mileage Tesla's that I have read have not mentioned very many repairs - and that seems to be the general consensus on the owner's forums.
Note that software updates are also considered 'recalls' on Teslas now.
one data point on a high mileage model 3 : https://electrek.co/2020/09/26/tesla-model-3-high-mileage-ex...
https://www.statista.com/chart/23586/average-reliability-sco...
Considering how many Teslas have been shipped, a postmarket community forming around the vehicles seems likely. I just don't know how successful it will be when the manufacturer is so hostile toward third party repairs and tinkering overall.
I don't doubt they are reliable cars, though. So are Apple computers and phones.
What I have come to realize though is that most people couldn't drive quickly in corners if their life depended on it.
And that there is nothing more satisfying than watching a Tesla or Audi become a small dot in the rearview mirror on a highway onramp or a switchback road, when the emblem on your trunk says "1.4 EcoFlex" and your bumper sticker says "Baby on board".
Sure, you'll get passed when the road straightens out again, but both them and me know that I've won.
Go out and actually drive the cars in this class and they're pretty much all the same. Honda build great cars, but let's not pretend you hop in an everyday Civic and it'll blow your socks off. They are very pedestrian.
We bought a Mazda3 because my wife didn't like the sight-lines in the Civic. YMMV.
It's a moving chair that gets me from A to B