i am looking at buying a gen 4. As with my gen 3 there were a couple incidents that either I or a shop drove over something low profile and trying to back up pulled the front splash guard under the front off partially and really ripped it up underneath. pet peeve but i guess other low profile cars also exxperience that
The short answer is NO. I've got a 3# sledge hammer under my seat; for those rebars that stick-up from those parking stops. My pet-peeve... You can install a lift kit and replace the tires to gain a bit more clearance.
The USS cannot detect the curb and it's really a passive warning, they only "activates" by itself. For example, when I take right turns, it will not turn on to make sure I'm not hitting a mailbox at the corner. If that happens, like a shop does the damage, talk to someone there and see if they can remedy it.
Let me share my real world experience with this: shortly after taking delivery of my 2022 XLE I was pulling into an angled parking space in a nearby town that has significantly higher curbs in their downtown area. Being used to a F250 Super Duty with very high clearance that I had driven for 12 years I didn’t give any thought to pulling close to the curb and placing it in park. A few inches of travel after doing so resulted in ~$1000 damage as the front bumper scraped up on top of the curb. I had all the warnings set to high sensitivity (FWTW). And there were no warnings since there are no sensors down that low. So the answer to your question is a resounding “NO”!
Nope: my deductible was a fair portion of it and it wasn’t worth the possible ding on my rates. Repair place actually cut $200 off of that quoted price for not having to wait for the insurance. So it ended up even better.
FWIW: mine is the Nightshade Edition which sits slightly lower (not that it would have mattered anyway).
According to my owners manual, pg. 362, there is a system called the Intuitive Parking Assist that will alert you to obstructions getting too close to the vehicle. There is quite a description of when or if a detection will be made and what can cause false detections or cause the system to fail to make a detection. Enough of this or that to eliminate any liability. There is a graphic on pg. 366 that shows the approximate volume scanned by each sensor around the periphery of the vehicle. There is a side and top view. The side view shows the vertical scanned volume at the front of the vehicle to be about the distance between the bottom of the bumper and the middle of the hood out in front. In my carport the height of the house foundation is about 3 inches higher than the floor of the carport and I regularly get a detection of this disparity at maybe a distance of 6 inches or so. Haven't measured it yet. So there is some overscan in the detectors. The curb detection the OP mentions sounds like something on the side of the road versus a parking bumper or curb in the front of the vehicle. There is lane departure detection, which would alert you to leaving the roadbed proper, called the Lane Tracing Assist on pg. 307 in my manual. That system generally works at speeds of 32 mph or more but detections can be made at lower speeds of configured for lane centering. No amount of electronic wizardry can make up for plain old situational awareness though. If there are that many obstructions in your vehicles path I would deploy a ground guide (a passenger in the vehicle or some other outside help).
You basically can't roll right up to concrete wheel stops with a Prius. If the rebars they're nailed down with protrude above the wheel stop, doubly so. I've had our foremost under-trim off 3~4 times, repairing the carnage.
Yesterday when I was parking after returning from work I pulled slowly forward until I got the detection. Then I did some measuring. There are two sensors on the front bumper and the forward distance from a sensor to the obstruction is 6 inches. There is also a vertical distance of about 18 inches between the edge of the obstruction and the sensor height. The front of the vehicle is curved, so the distance from the most forward part of the bumper to the obstruction is about 4 inches. It's funny though that in the few parking lots left that have bumpers I don't recall getting a detection. I must not be pulling forward far enough.
