So I ended up with a Prius for a rental from Hertz recently, still pretty new with just over 3000 miles. I only had an 80 mile round trip but being that it was in Los Angeles it took 4 hours not including stops, but that is another thread of hate.
What I liked:
1. The rearward visibility was great. That CRX style vertical section really helped.
2. The mileage was great too. Over the 80 miles I used less than 2 gallons of gas. I was driving slow enough that I could use electric only mode a decent amount so I'm sure that helped.
3 The radio was pretty good and stopped annoying me after I was able to get rid of the gas mileage trend line taking up the whole damn screen.
What I didn't like:
Everything else. I really hated this car. The interfaces between the driver and the vehicle generally sucked. The best of them all was the shifter which achieved not annoying me. The brakes had no feel and inconsistent response, I'm guessing due to regenerative braking. There was no appreciable difference in what the car did for the first 90% of travel in the accelerator pedal. The last 10% had a marginal improvement, but the car was still painfully underpowered. The steering felt completely disconnected from the car with no feedback and little self centering effect. I might as well have been steering through a Playstation controller. Droning along on a normal highway this probably wouldn't be that bad, but on LA's dogshit roads every pothole and road seam wanted to kick me in to another lane or the Jersey barrier.
Speaking of Playstation, there were multiple displays that would tell me exactly how efficient my driving was both at any moment and over time. The car would also tell me in real time when my driving style required the car to switch efficiency modes and where motive power was coming from. I guess all that kind of looked interesting for 5 minutes. After that I found it all to be useless distractions at a time when generally people are spending far to little time paying attention to what is happening outside their cars while they are driving.
I suppose I could say it is an appliance, like driving a toaster, except using a toaster doesn't annoy me. What really struck me is that the car seemed specifically designed to remove the driver from the process as much as possible, like the requirement to have an actual person behind the wheel was an impediment. In my view the Prius is ultimately a great candidate for the driverless car since I sure as hell didn't enjoy the job. For a point of comparison I find my 9 year old truck with 130k miles significantly more engaging and enjoyable to drive.
For those of you that own them I hope they do what you want, I just couldn't imagine buying one myself.
|