I just finished my second road trip of the year with my almost 6 month old Prius Plug-in. There were a few quirks, surprises and inconveniences that I would like to share with you. 1) GPS signal - I do not know why, but I lost GPS signal for a significant part of the trip through remote areas of New Mexico, Colorado and even while in Kansas. The GPS didn't seem to mind that it had no signal as it continued to guide me, but it was a bit disconcerting. I didn't recall experiencing a loss of satellite signal when I took similar road trips on my Gen II Prius. In this car I noticed that the GPS logo would be dark gray for up to 30 to 40 minutes at a time. I notice this situation during travel in certain remote locations of these particular states. I know I have the windows tinted, but I used Huper Optik ceramic window film. In one of the times when it lost GPS signal, the windows were all open. 2) HDD Nav System - Not impressed at all! This is a slow, sluggish, irritating navigation system. Is so not up to Toyota standards. I ended wishing I had my Gen 4 navigation system that I loved and miss in my old Prius Gen II. The system is more complicated than it should be, it takes to many steps to do simple things. When you are approaching an intersection under guidance and the system is showing you lane guidance, you loose the Zoom in/out buttons. This was also the case in the Gen II, but you could use the Voice Recognition program to ask the car to Zoom in and out. You cannot do this on a HDD equipped Prius. The split screen is not that useful when you are listening to Pandora as it has no buttons. The half of the screen displaying the audio info only shows info. If you want to "Thumbs Up" a song you have to fully open the app. Which takes time and is distracting while driving. Entering an address manually is a paying when you have the auto-complete setting on. You press a letter and it takes too long to respond as it tries to narrow down the search. It feels slower than the DVD based system. GPS signal acquisition upon starting the car, takes to long. I found myself getting in the car, engaging the nav system and when I started driving the car showed up as if it was off the road on the nav screen. It took a mile or two of driving for the car to locate its current position. 3) LED Low beam headlights with Halogen high beam. This is the perfect combination for a car's headlights. The LED's were great, providing a wide and full beam. The halogen high beams were perfect for those dark two lane roads as they provided a flood light like beam. They illuminated everything and cover a great distance, they are very bright. The halogen high beams complement the LED low beam headlights perfectly. I am very please with this lighting set up. 4) Yokohama Avid S33 - I love this tires! They are miles ahead of the Good Year Integrity found on the Gen II Prius. They perform very well; they can corner, brake and handle rain very nicely. I am pleased with these tires. 5) Fuel tank - that missing gallon of fuel really does make a difference. The smaller tank on the Plug-in Prius does make a difference on road trips by reducing the range by approximately 55-62 miles. However, is not a deal breaker for me. It was a good excuse for a rest stop. 6) Lumbar support - this was a god sent feature! It made all the difference in the world. My back was thankful that the car had this feature. I woke up this morning pain free! I drove yesterday from Colorado Springs back to Fort Worth with no back pain at all. 7) Map button - I found myself missing the Map button that the Gen II had in the steering wheel. It is a bit of reach to press the map button on a Gen III Prius. 8) Heads up display - I loved this feature but found a few issues here and there. I don't like how the speedometer disappears when the Nav system is giving you intersection directions. I remember the Camaro's HUD would shrink the speedometer size and move it to a corner when displaying other types of info on the HUD. You could still see your current speed while getting other info displayed on the windshield. The HUD auto brightness sensor is annoying during dawn and dusk. I had to manually increase the brightness too many times. 9) Rattles - This car loves to rattle in a very inconsistent manner. You never get the same rattle and they don't all happen at the same time or with any consistency. A few of the rattles that came and went came from the trim piece by the driver side front quarter window (the piece with the defrost vent), the dash board had a rattle right in the area in front of the MID, the HUD area was also the source of a very annoying and more frequent rattle. 10) Suspension - I found the ride over long highway travel to be very comfortable. I think the extra battery weight really improved the way the back of the car feels in the highway. It has a more planted feel to it. I also noticed a dramatic reduction is crosswind issues. This cars handles very nicely is high cross wind situations. 11) Charging stations - Colorado has few and far between charging stations. However, I loved all the stations that I found. You pulled up, plug in and that was it. No card needed and no fuss. Free and simple! I did find an issue with the only station in found in Colorado Springs. It is in Cinema Point in front of the Cinemark in the only area of the complex where the spots are angled. The Prius Plug in does not like angle parking spots. I found myself having to drive the wrong way so I could park in reverse and plug in. To be honest I didn't like how people looked at me as if I was a jerk for going the wrong way instead of driving around. (If they only knew I had no choice but to pull in against traffic in order to reach the plug). Maybe Toyota will do something along the lines of the Old Jaguar XJ with the dual fuel fillers and add a second port closer to the front of the car. 12) Driver's oriented dashboard - this car has all the center console buttons and nav screen oriented toward the driver. If you are sitting in the front passenger seat, it is not that easy to get to the buttons on the left side of the nav screen. 13) Rubber mats - I strongly recommend a set of rubber all weather mats for anyone planning a road trip. They will save your carpet time after time. 14) Spare tire or lack of there of - I have to admit my nervousness when we first took off on this road trip to Colorado. However, after a while I new there were certain options available in the even of a flat tire. I have to admit feeling better I had the safety connect in case of the flat. Maybe if the car was not equipped with Safety Connect I would have been a bit more concerned. 15) AT&T - Entune was useless for most of the trip since the Edge network of AT&T can't handle the needs of the Entune apps. Since I was driving in remote areas of the country, AT&T's service was not up to date. I would say that 75% of the time my iPhone was under Edge network coverage only. 16) XM Radio - another god sent was the XM Radio; since the Entune's Pandora and iHeart radio apps were useless while on the Edge network, XM Radio provided countless hours of listening pleasure. This was the first time I had properly used the XM Radio for an extended length of time. I have come to really appreciate this service and its wide variety of content. 17) DVD player - take one or two movies with you when going on a road trip. You never know when the built in DVD player will come in handy while resting in a rest area. 18) Cargo space/practicality - The amount of cargo room is one of my favorite design features of this car. There is a lot of storage areas and you truly have space for 4 adults and all of their luggage. 19) A/C remote and headlights - The advance model comes equipped with Auto headlights that turn on and off depending on outdoor light levels. When you turn off and lock the car the lights stay on for a short period of time. However, GM cars will turn the lights on when you unlock the car to illuminate your approach. I really like this feature and wished the Prius had it. I found out it does have it, sort of. If you switch the lights from Auto to On. When you press the A/C button on the remote to engage the remote climate control system, the headlights will turn on. If you left the fog lights on when you turned off the car, they will not turn on during the remote A/C 10 minute cycle. I assume that's to save battery charge, Toyota only allows for the headlights to be on during this time. I am pretty sure this would also apply to a base Plug in Prius. I would go as far as saying that this should apply to any Prius with the A/C remote on the key fob. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong! This feature came in handy when we stopped in dark rest areas in the middle of nowhere. 20) Turn signal repeater - I really wish the Prius came with turn signal repeaters in the side mirror. I purchased a set of JDM mirrors for the Plug in but turns out I order the wrong Prius color. I ordered the magnetic gray from the PriusV instead of the Plug-in's Wintergray metallic. Incidentally, if anyone with a PriusV is interested in the JDM turn signal mirrors; I have a brand new set for $110 dollars already painted (magnetic gray metallic). (The kit includes new painted covers, LED turn signal with pilot and puddle light and wiring cables).
I agree that it feels really slow, which is surprising since I read that it is flash-based, so the random access times should be very fast. It's especially disappointing since something like an iPad (which actually would be a wonderful replacement for the head unit) is so responsive in terms of both speed and the touchscreen. I didn't realize that auto-complete was slowing it down. I'll have to try disabling it. The S33s were pretty quiet to begin with, but I went ahead and switched to Goodyear Assurance ComforTred Touring tires after good experiences with the quiet ride of the ComforTred on my 2004 Prius. I didn't notice any noise improvement, so so the S33s are pretty quiet. However, I read that the S33s get louder when the tread wears down and that they don't last that long. The guy I sold mine too was replacing the original S33s on his Gen3 Prius after only about 20-25K miles, tho' he didn't rotate them, so that may have contributed to fast wear. +1 I found the HUD Nav to be useless, so I never use it. As for brightness, just leave it on full brightness all the time and it never seems too bright to me (sometimes it could be brighter, but it's still very usable). I totally agree. I have no idea what Toyota was thinking moving the charging port to the back. The prototype location by the driver's door was so much better for US owners, tho' it may not have been so great for Japanese owners. This bothered me at first, but then I remembered that I've never had a flat tire since I started checking my air pressure/rotating regularly. I think the two flats I had before could have been avoided if I did that. I've never had a flat in my 2004 Prius after 125K+ miles. The other flat I've experienced in a friend's car could have been avoided with some evasive driving that I think I would done. I don't use Entune very much b/c it's so slow to start up and when you switch to the map and back to Entune it has to start up again. It's even slower than the non-Entune head unit functions. Interesting, I found XM Radio to be like cable. Hundreds of channels and hard to find anything worth listening to. If I could just find a few reliably good channels to stick to, but it's way too annoying to sort of scan through all of them. +1 and I wish for the sideview mirrors that automatically angled down to help w/ parallel parking and fold in when the car is off.
PRPrius, thanks for sharing. Good info. I want to add something else about the XM Radio. After choosing the channels you want on your favorites list the list does not tell you the name of the channel afterwards. On my 2006 Prius it gave both the channel number AND name. This software feature was certainly not written by a programmer who has used this radio. There was a time when using old style radios you could remember which of 4 to 6 buttons you programmed and what they were. But now with hundreds of possible combinations and a bunch of separate lists it becomes impossible to remember what you picked on your lists. All they save is the XM channel number or the AM/FM frequency. I'm not a computer. I want a channel name saved even if I have to type it in myself. I wish they would correct this. Again thanks. Cheers .
