I'll be picking up my brand new 2010 Prius on Wednesday, however I'm curious about the self-parking feature -- I'll likely never use it (in Canada if you want the Nav you have to get the parking assist as well) but I got to wondering, once you're in parallel parking mode and set to back in, the screen with the four directional arrows appear: what would happen if you presses a given arrow repeatedly until the formerly empty parking spot now overlapped a nearby car?Would the Prius obediently ram said car, or is the system aware enough that it would cancel the maneouvre?
Hey Mike, it's my limited experience with the IPA that the radar would override the camera and would not let you collide with another vehicle. Now, with that said, anytime you feed a system extremely bad data (intentionally or otherwise) chances are it will screw up. My experience with the IPA was all positive. Since I live in a city and park on the street every day, it's something that was attractive but in the end, I passed on it because I wanted the sunroof more. I've been parallel parking for more than three decades, it's no big deal to me.
If the box is red, it will not start the IPA system. If you move the box so it overlaps with another car, the box will turn red. You can move the box so that you're close to another car (e.g. the mirror will hit it) and it'll still back up for you (I tried it with the Back-In Mode) so be aware of your surroundings when the vehicle is parking for you.
I haven't really found a chance to try out the parallel parking either yet, but I have tried the back-in parking several times. While it certainly won't collide with other vehicles if you set it correctly, I find that you also can't expect a picture perfect park. It'll definitely get the job done, and it's pretty cool, but don't expect a perfectly aligned parking job
