The 'Subaru' tax less so... [1]
Mazda is somewhat the exception here; a lot of their stuff is some branch of the Ford tech branch lineage, but they at least went down the path of 'not leaking coolant into cylinders' with their engine design.
But I digress.
It's an information problem because the owner may or may not know about engine/transmission/electrical[2] The the first two parts of that are -fairly- consistent across models... you'll see some cars that frequently sell at certain mileage points, and sometimes part of that is because savvy owners know that it's near a hard maintenance point (or common failure point.)
[0] - Shift Flare on Aisin(Toyota) transmissions is far less of a real problem than many Honda 5 speeds, for example.
[1] - I've found my Subaru, despite having a reputation for being 'touchy' was perfectly fine up to the point an oil change was borked. After that it's been a slow downhill.
[2] - These are the biggest 'money pits' in my experience, baring 'cooling system' issues that were actually engine design issues (looking at you, AMC I6 Grand Cherokee!)
> untenable in the age of electric cars
Frankly, Subaru is in a tough spot with that. Most of Subaru's unique 'value prop' outside of JDM is that their overall design makes for a fairly cheap but effective AWD system. AFAICT there's no good 'translation' to that for an electric car.
Mazda... I'm of the opinion they probably suffered a bit from Ford divesting most/all of their interest in them. (OTOH, Ford has suffered a bit, the more Ford tries to 'improve' the otherwise very reliable Mazda 4Cyl designs the more problems they seem to have...)
At this rate I might as well get an AWD Prius. Terribly disappointed with Subaru. It's not like they are unaware of the problems, visit any Subaru forum/subreddit and the common complaints are very obvious.