'05 Prius got totalled- what's new in '11?

Yeah, I know the GPS unit has contact sync via Bluetooth built-in. I guess I'll find out soon enough about the non-GPS Bluetooth

...unless anyone who has it wants to chip in

 

(sorry if double-posting is a faux pas here)

I got my new car! It's "Blizzard Pearl" Prius II; it turns out the Bluetooth was a Toyota-branded "Blu-Logic" hands-free kit that is pretty basic, but works well enough.



Driving it from the dealer, to home, to work, and back to home, I got ~55MPG, and it's not even broken in. I can't wait to see how it _really_ performs.

(Is there any reason _not_ to use ECO mode pretty much all the time?)

 

Thanks! I ended up going with Larry Miller on Bell- the salesperson there was much less pushy and went the extra mile for me to get something I could afford and also met my needs. I still have a sour taste in my mouth from the extremely high-pressure salesperson at Camelback.

As for the A/C in ECO mode, it's been more than sufficient, so I've been taking the manual at its word and using ECO for stop-and-go surface street driving and normal mode on the interstate. I may also experiment by driving the second tank entirely on ECO and the third entirely on normal to see if there's any appreciable difference.

 

Thanks, Clickerman. I got down to $24k before all the doc fees, finance charges, expected interest, registration, and all of that claptrap. I had the expectations of years ago when I walked in, where the starting point was MSRP, but thanks to the catastrophe in Japan, all the dealers out here have a "market adjustment" on their Prii that I had to talk them into waving off.

As for the comparison between my old Gen II and my new Gen III; it's not really apples-to-apples (I had a Package 6 '05; my new car is a Prius II with an add-in Bluetooth kit).

The car drives fantastically, and I'm getting the mileage brand new that I was getting on my well-broken-in '05, so I imagine after the first kilomile or so, I'll have another five to ten MPG. I also probably have to learn new muscle memories for optimal pulse-and-glide technique for the '11. The ECO gague is, I imagine, helping with that.

I only have two complaints about the new interior, really- I no longer have a handy place to set my cell so that I can easily see who is calling me without digging it out of a cupholder, but I can just turn on call screening with Google Voice to take care of that.

Also, the floor mat has a tendency to, when I get out of the car, unhook itself from its retaining hooks when I get out of the car, so I sometimes have to hook it back in. This is probably an artifact of it being brand-new, and it may just need to settle into place.

 

I just got back from a quick errand, after which I stopped in at Larry Miller to get the reverse beep set to one beep. It's funny- it seems this is the one things there's not some magic happy-dance I can do myself to configure. The tech came out with the laptop so I got to peek over his shoulder as he made the change. I know it's made for pretty much every Toyota with an OBD-II, but lordy their software is slow.

That's good to know. I work practically across the street, so may use them for routine service. Cheers!

 

Huh. Okay, well, should it happen again, I'll have my dealer take a gander.

 

I would have preferred the Prius III, but there weren't any available and I was under a time crunch to replace my old car.

On the upside, I can drive this around, overpay the bills, and improve my credit and hopefully have a hell of a trade-in on a better model in a year or two.

ETA:
Is Avondale still sticking with MSRP, or are they using 'market adjustments' like like the four other dealers I checked with?