Every now and then I do somthing silly and the car reprimands me. Everytime it uses a new "phrase," I have to learn what the heck it's saying. For example, when it screams at me, other wise known as a long sustained beep when I try to lock the doors, that means, "Hey stupid, you left your keys in here." I have yet to learn what the rythmic exterior beeping, that sounds like the car is counting down to explode, means. But yesterday I had the most annoying interpretation issue yet. I got into my car with a bunch of packages and backed out of the garage. I put the car in drive and it started screaming at me. The MFD game me some message about "If you leave the car in neutral the battery won't charge" and the dash lit up with a bunch of scary symbols. I checked that the car was in fact in Drive not Neutral. It was. I pawed it into D again just to be sure. The car kept screaming. Put it back in R, and it stopped. Back to D, and banshee city. I tried "rebooting" by switching it off and back on, put it in D and it started screaming again. I went through this several times, getting really frustrated, before I could get past all the other lights and noises and messages to realise, my door wasn't fully closed. So ok, I get that beeps can be cryptic, but if the problem is that the door is open, why not say THAT on the MFD instead of this message about the battery not charging in Neutral, especailly if the car is NOT in Neutral? So anyway, my latest phrase in Priuseese is that screaming accompanied by messages about not charging the battery while in Neutral means, "Hey dumb nice person, close your door." They could have made this simpler.
Thanks for the heads up. That message does seem a little hard to interpret! Maybe it's the Japanese translation...
Wow that must have been annoying... It's funny that the message you get is "you are in neutral" because the car refuse to go into "D" since the door is open... Being a HW and SW engineer I always find it funny how we can screw it up!
it means you left your door... most likely the drivers door... OPEN. strange huh? Try it sometime with the car in Drive, foot on the brake.
Have you tried driving off without your seat belt plugged in? OK for about 100 yards but then the screaming starts and gets louder and louder. I didn't wait to find out how long this continues, or whether it gets worse!
So, even though the gear indicator said it was in D, and I had put it in D, it wasn't really in D? That doesn't jive becasue I could actually drive the car forward, with it screaming the whole time. Actually I did the seatbelt hack durring the first week, so I don't even remember the horror anymore. Now I get four beeps and then silence. Allthough I'm super anal about wearing seatbelts, so it's moot anyway!
