Well, I have nearly 1500 miles and six weeks on my 2006 Prius, so I finally feel qualified to write a review.
I've leaned towards performance for quite a number of years. Perhaps that was in reaction to my first car (a used '81 Olds Cutlass Supreme that had same-day acceleration). As a result, I was hesitant to get the Prius; yes, I wanted to make a Statement about not using fuel, and I was OK with the premium that a hybrid would command, but was I ready to put up with its relative lack of performance? Turns out, yes, and without regrets. I bought a 2006 with all the options (actually, my package choice was dictated more by availability than personal wants).
I traded in a '99 Toyota Solara. Even here, I had made an accommodation with performance. It had brisk acceleration but, despite its sporty appearance, hardly handled like a sports car. Ironically, it is handling that I now prefer over acceleration; not so long ago, I thought I'd get a car that didn't guzzle gas but was nimble around the traffic cones.
Why the heck a Prius? For me, it was a matter of principle. It wasn't so much
spending less on gas as
using less gas. In other words, my worldview came around to use as little gas as possible. Taking a bike on short trips, consolidating longer trips so that I wouldn't make single-purpose drives, and... getting a car that used less fuel and put out fewer emissions. After considering the Camry Hybrid (a sweet car), I decided this was best served by a Prius, and I set out to finally look one over.
The first dealer I went to didn't have any on the lot. He asked me how "rapidly" I needed one. When asked to define "rapidly," he said four or five months. Yes, I wanted it more rapidly than that. It was early July, and I wanted one before the federal tax credit for the car would halve after September. So I went to the dealer where I had purchased my Solara, and was able to rent a fleet car for a day.
I was sold. The car was different. Quirky. You don't use a key to get inside; you carry a fob with a wireless transmitter. Take the door handle in hand and they car beeps and unlocks. Sit down inside, put your foot on the brake and press the Power button. The car lights up. How cool is that? (This "smart key" function is not in the base package.)
The Prius is considerably roomier inside than its modestly-sized exterior would suggest. In part, this is due to the dashboard being set back, away from driver and passenger. This means that the basic indicators (speed, gear, odometer, et al) are a couple of feet in front of you, under a little canopy. Odd to see, but
sensible. A friend of mine who recently sat in the car immediately admired this, pointing out that you could see it more easily than a traditional dash since it required less refocusing from a view of the road. There is plenty of headroom, plenty of legroom (even in the back), and the interior just
feels expansive.
The bulk of the controls reside in a multi-function display (MFD). Here you have the climate controls, audio system, navigation system (if so equipped) and the addictive info centers that show your fuel usage. More on that later.
Driving the car
Shifting is accomplished non-conventionally. A little stick (referred to by some as a lipstick container) sits on the dash. Pop it to the left, and the car is in neutral. Pop it to the left and down, and you're in drive. Left and up is reverse. Regardless of where you move it to, when you let go, the stick gently snaps back to its original position. And yes, this means that there's no first, second, third, or fourth gear. The car has a continuously variable transmission (CVT) and keeps the engine at optimal RPMs for power and efficiency. That takes a little getting used to: the car simply doesn't shift. Of course, it also means that acceleration is smoother than usual. In all but the most basic option package, putting the car into reverse also activates a rearview camera--something that is decidedly helpful, considering the relative lack of rear visibility in the car (however, the surprising brightness of the camera screen can be distracting when backing up at night, especially when you need to use your side-view mirrors). Some people dislike the beeping backup alarm (audible inside the cabin, not an external warning). A little judicious searching online will tell you how to disable this (no disassembly or technical know-how necessary).
The transmission also has a "B" setting, which simulates putting the car into a lower gear for if you go down a long, steep hill.
The car's handling can best be described as "competent." In some ways, I like the handling better than my '99 Solara's, which though it seemed to have a smoother suspension under most circumstances, nevertheless transmitted larger bumps more than the Prius's does (though it did not handle markedly better, the Solara was smoother on the little seams and imperfections you find everywhere). The feel of the Prius isn't luxury-car smooth nor is it sports-car jittery. This described the handling, also.
Put another way, the car does not provide the feedback from its performance system (brakes, steering, suspension) that a performance enthusiast might demand, but for people who want a car that won't exasperate them or make them feel unsafe, the Prius is more than fine. Its tires are pretty skinny (though not technically "low rolling-resistance tires," despite what you might read), and the limits of their stickiness go along with that. Don't try to shoot through that cloverleaf at 70mph.
Acceleration. There are, in a sense, three ways to accelerate, though you don't need to worry about which to choose. Electric only, gas-only, or gas/electric. At the most modest of accelerations, the electric motor will move the car. Depending on accelerator position (can't call it a gas pedal), and depending upon the hybrid battery's state of charge (SOC), the gas motor (internal combustion engine, or ICE) will activate, either with assistance from the electric motor, or while driving the wheels and charging the battery (turning the electric motor into a generator). Because of the torquiness of the electric motor (actually, there are two electric motors, but only one directly drives the car) and its efficient operation at low speeds and at a different peak range than the ICE, acceleration feels sprightlier than you might expect from the numbers. Again, it's not a race car, but you won't get the feeling of possible impending death while merging onto a parkway.
Braking. When you brake normally, you don't, in a sense, actually brake; that is, the friction brakes don't activate. The drivetrain engages the electric motor and turns it into a generator, both recharging the hybrid battery and slowing the car like brakes normally would. This "regenerative braking" is present at other times: when you take your foot off the accelerator, it engages regenerative braking to a lesser extent, simulating the engine braking that normally occurs in a car that when you are not using the pedal. However, the engine itself is disengaged, so your speed reduction goes to charge your battery rather than simply losing energy. If you brake hard, the standard friction brakes come into play (as they do under regenerative braking, once the car hits around 8mph) The transition from regenerative to friction braking is seamless enough that you have to concentrate to tell when it happens--and you might just be guessing. Not only is this process efficient from an energy use point of view, but it makes your brakes last far longer. I've spoken to Prius owners who still have plenty of brake pad left with 60,000 plus miles on their cars. Of course, this requires some attention.
Maximization of gas and brake conservation requires the driver to be at least basically aware of the differences in a Prius, and implementation of a combination of techniques. One such technique is called "pulse and glide." This technique is covered in detail on multiple Prius-centric web pages, so I'll relate this with some brevity.
You accelerate to 40 mph at moderate acceleration. From there, you let off the pedal entirely, then ease it back on just a bit. This disengages the systems entirely--no gas/battery use, no recharging. This is where the MFD comes in. One screen shows you just where power is going at that moment: if the ICE is on and if it's powering the wheels, if the battery is driving the electric motor, with or without the ICE, and/or if the ICE is recharging the battery. It does so with a high-res display showing a "skeleton" of the car: four wheels (rotating when the car is moving), a battery, electric motor, and ICE, and differently colored animated arrows to show the direction of power. You want the display to be empty of arrows (you're giving it enough accelerator to turn off regenerative braking, but not enough to power the wheels). You then coast down to around 30 mph. At this point, gas it back up to 40 mph (if you push the pedal down and then barely back off, you'll both accelerate and recharge the battery). Do this over and over, and you'll get great fuel economy. One team managed to average 110 mpg using a stock Prius under ideal pulse-and-glide conditions, and traveled 1397 miles on a tank of gas (somehow managing to stuff in 12.78 gallons). The 40 mph limit is because above that speed, either the ICE or electric motors will likely be active, or you can't undo regenerative engine braking.
Similarly, I've learned to relax my braking habits. Did the light down the road turn red? Let off the accelerator. No need to rush to a red light. Touch the brake pedal lightly, and you'll turn your gradual deceleration into energy recovery. If you can time it so that you arrive at the light as it turns green, all the better. Of course, be aware of conditions: don't crawl slowly enough that people stuck behind you fly into a rage.
Using tricks such as these, I've managed to average about 53 mpg over nearly 1500 miles--and I've hardly driven under ideal conditions or maximized my use of such techniques.
More about the car's interior. Fit and finish is just grand, like I'd expect from Toyota. There are the various cubbyholes: an armrest storage bin, one below/in front of the center console,
two glove compartments (oddly, neither have locks), a sunglass storage bin in the roof, and a storage bin under the trunk deck. Assorted drink holders.
The MFD might have its detractors, mainly because you need it to fully access control of the climate and audio systems, as well as the info system that details your gas usage. Fortunately, there are steering wheel-mounted controls that allow you to use the most common functions without needing to cycle through those screens. You can turn the audio system on and off, choose radio bands or CD player, cycle through your presets, or CD tracks, and raise/lower the volume. If no CD is inserted, that mode is skipped; likewise, if you plug an audio device, such as an iPod, into the AUX input inside the armrest, you can play it through your audio system (an AUX selection is made available).
The steering wheel controls can also turn the climate system on and off, and raise and lower the temperature (though not fan speed). You can also switch between the two "info" screen (one, as mentioned that shows where power is coming from as well as current MPG, and another that shows a bar-graph of MPG since the car was powered on, in five-minute intervals, as well as a reset-able indicator of overall economy). The MFD display also selects the navigation system, if so equipped.
Several audio controls also reside on the CD system on the dashboard, though you still need the MFD for complete access.
There is a lot of cargo room, because the car is a hatchback and the rear seats can fold down, giving you impressive cubic feet of space. This also means you don't have a separately-securable trunk: there is a "privacy cover" for the hatch area, but that'll keep out prying eyes and nothing else.
Overall, I am happy with my purchase, but that does not mean that it does not have faults.
The seats. Oh, how I wish I could replace them! I can understand why they don't have power seats (to save on weight), but why not at least some more manual adjustability? You can move them forward and back, and the seatback can pivot. That's it. No lumbar adjustment or--to my greatest annoyance--no way to adjust the seat angle. I have long legs, proportionately longer than my arms, which means that when my arms are appropriately distant, my legs are bent upwards. This means my thighs basically hang above the seat. Every car I've had since the early '90s has allowed me to adjust the seat bottom with an upwards tilt, giving me support. Not in the Prius. Though I'd like a lumbar support, I
need the seat-bottom to be tilt-able. I know that there are Prius owners who go so far as to lose the seat-mounted side airbags so that they can install aftermarket seats (e.g., from Recaro).
Visibility: aside from the aforementioned visibility issue, the A-pillars (the frontmost support columns for the roof) are quite large and can interfere with left-right vision (a potential issue during turns). The rear-view mirror is lower than I'd like, sometimes blocking things that are in a line of sight past it.
The GPS navigation system. I've had a
Garmin Streetpilot 2620 for the last two years, and I
much prefer it over the Toyota navigation system ("Nav"). I had thought to get the Nav system because of its integration: no worries about packing it up when parked or risk theft, and its integration with the drive train means that you get dead reckoning when the satellites are blocked (in tunnels, under heavy tree cover, etc.). And, of course, the screen is bigger than the 2620's. However, its shortcomings more than overwhelm its positive aspects.
First, probably as a nod to their legal department, the system's interaction is largely gone whenever the car is in motion. Are you driving down the Interstate and realize you need to find a gas station? Find someplace to pull over: unless you're stopped, you can't use the Nav to find one (a good trick on the Interstate, where only emergency stops are allowed). Need to add a stop? Even a passenger in your car can't use the system to find it. What annoys me the most about this supposed concession to safety (i.e., a reduction in distractibility) is its inconsistency. How many Prius owners are spending a lot of time monitoring the pretty gas-consumption screen, trying to maximize usage? Why can you fiddle with the Nav system to switch between differently configured map screens (showing a compass, turn lists, and other info), basically "neat" but not very useful information? It responds to voice commands; why not let you say "Find gas"? And most of all, they added Bluetooth phone interaction. Jabbering away on the phone is arguably the most distracting thing you can do (more distracting than dialing; see Virginia Tech's massive Spring 2006 study).
Then again, this would be even more frustrating if the Nav system were better and we would therefore be missing more. Most shameful omission: being able to find things along a route. If you are driving along a route plotted on the 2620, you can use it to find other destinations X distance off that route. That is, say you are driving along a programmed route from point A to point B and realize you need to find gas, or perhaps a motel. With the 2620, you can tell it to find gas a short distance on either side of the route from where you currently are ahead to point B; you can also choose just how far off the current route to look. Or you realize that you won't make Point B this day, so you can find a motel just off the route, X miles ahead. Wonderful, wonderful function, and totally impossible with the Nav system. Oh, yes, there's an "On Route" function for finding locations, but they must
literally be on the route. If you're traveling a couple of hundred miles on an Interstate, the Nav system literally won't see the gas stations you so desperately need, though they're located just off an exit!!
Also annoying: you can only calculate a route from your current position (and cannot plan a routes for where you'll be another time).That is, if you want to evaluate various routes you will be traveling the next day (from different start points), you simply can't, unless you want to set it up as one big route-a PITA if you're simply trying to evaluate various choices for potential destinations.. You also can't save routes for future use.
Searches don't update as you drive. With my Garmin, if I look for a place (called waypoints by Garmin, POIs--points of interest--by Toyota), matching results update as I drive. Case in point: I was driving along and needed to find a pharmacy. Stopped at a light, I began my search for pharmacies near my current position, which yielded results just as the light turned green so I didn't have the chance to select one. The next time I was able to stop, I'd driven several miles and the search results still
showed what had been nearby when I started searching--several miles back! Rather than the system updating results to show me what was now nearby, I had to cancel the search and start from the beginning. The Garmin updates the information in real-time, as I drive.
Search results by name are scattershot--even if you're looking for a chain store, the particular one you want could be hidden among dozens of search results. For example, a search for Carvel yielded seven screen of matches, including "Carvel Ice Cream" and "Carvel Ice Cream Bakery," among others. That is, I don't mean it found that many names, but that many CATEGORICAL matches before you even get to the names themselves (why is a single chain divided up among a couple of dozen separate categories?). Inexplicably, there were two categorical results for "Carvel Ice Cream," under Fast Food and under Restaurants (other), one with a 100 results and the other with 18, and 123 results for "Carvel Ice Cream Bakery" under Ice Cream and four under what inexplicably seems to be Seafood. With all those results, none included the place I was looking for--even though it's been in that location for 15+ years.
And why doesn't it tell you the upcoming intersections? It would be nice to have a readout of what cross-street is coming up (like my Garmin does).
The user interface is terrible. The 2620 is considerably more intuitive. In the course of two years, I never needed to read the Garmin manual; I've had to with the Nav system (and it's still clumsy). Though the Nav system's screen is larger and has a higher resolution than the 2620's, because of how the display is arranged it is considerably more cluttered and less usable.
The Nav system is also unreliable. Testing it locally, I asked it to take me to a store located on the service road off a highway. From eastbound on the highway, it told me to exit onto a cloverleaf for a local road headed north. Then it told me to exit west. Then back south on the same local road. Then back east on the highway. Then back north... in other words, an eternal loop. And it wasn't even the right exit. Another search directed me to an auto-parts store, but allegedly located inside a residential neighborhood (one I was familiar with, so I knew not to bother). Two other searches tried to take me to the
old locations of certain businesses--including one that had moved about a half-dozen years earlier.
And this is in one of the "high detail" areas of the map! The coverage map is dismayingly small. In the areas without detailed coverage, I shudder to think of what it'll miss. I think I'll bring my 2620 along on longer trips.
Another annoyance: each and every time you select the Nav system after starting the car, you have to accept to an "I agree to do things safely..." agreement. Each and every time. Did you set a route on the nav system, but make a quick stop somewhere? Don't count on the nav system resuming to show your route unless you accept the agreement again. You use two buttons on the console around the Nav system: Dest (Destination) and Map. You use Map to (of course) show the map, and Dest to plot a destination. But when you first press Dest, it takes you to that annoying disclaimer screen; when you hit OK it takes you to the Map screen, not Destination mode. You have to press Dest a second time.
Last, my Garmin has a light sensor, which switches it from Day mode (dark text on a light background) to Night (basically the reverse, thereby helping to keep your night vision). The Nav system works more bizarrely: it depends on your headlight setting. Day mode with headlights off, night when they're on. The main problem with this is that here in NY the law requires you to put your headlights on when it rains. So the other day I had the headlights on while it was raining but still rather bright out and the Nav screen was all but unreadable. There is a way around this: you have to manually set the dash lights into the
brightest setting, which puts the Nav system into Day mode. And when it does get dark out, you need to take the dash lights out of their brightest setting, or the Nav system won't switch out of Day mode.
Were I able to re-purchase the car, I'd do so without the Nav system and maybe just use the money to update or replace the 2620. That would also mean no factory leather (the Nav system is added to the option packages first). The fabric seems nice, and the fabric seats are exactly the same configuration as the leather. I've been very impressed with some of the seat covers added by Prius owners with the fabric (some, I've liked even more than the leather), though those with fabric were very impressed with the quality (and hopeful durability) of the leather armrests and center console of my car. Of course, dealer-installed leather is also a possibility. Otherwise, I have no buyer's remorse. I am in fact a proud Prius owner, and I'd buy the car again if time were rewound and I was given the option.
New or prospective owners out to look for the online Prius discussion groups, such as priuschat.
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