European Prius test drive

I'm in the market for a new Prius and have pretty much made up my mind to buy a Prius in the coming months. The Prius would replace the Corolla Verso diesel I'm currently driving. I've owned a Opel Vectra, an old Toyota Camry and a Toyota Avensis in the past. I keep buying Toyota's because of the high reliability and low maintenancy cost.

I did a test drive in a Prius Sol, this is a 17" model with nav and led lights. There's only one higher model, the Sol Premium, which adds ACC, leather heated seats, moon roof and solar.

With all the comments about how bad the nav is on the Prius, my expections were low. I was extremely positively surprised about how good it was, in particalur in combination with the HUD (which is standard on euro models) which is the star of the Prius. During the entire test drive, I practically didn't look at the instrument panel, all the info I needed appeared right there on the HUD as if the car could read my mind.

I experienced 2 slightly negative points:
1) The car felt seriously underpowered when entering the highway. I then remembered to put the car in power mode and this makes an enormous difference.
The dealer made me do the test drive with an almost empty battery: I pressed the start button, an almost within seconds the engine started to run to charge the battery. I wonder if the power would have been better if the battery had been fully charged.
I also realised that the smooth but somewhat slow accelleration (e.g. accellerating after having stopped for a red light) might be just psychological, since there is no vibration like you have when swithing gears in a car with a manual gear box.
I guess I'll have no trouble at all with power, the traffic in Belgium is so congested that I'd rather have the peace and quiet of a Prius in a traffice jam than the few seconds of power in a BMW during my daily commute.
2) I found the ride rather hard. Not annoyingly hard, just harder than my Corolla. This is probably much better when using 15" wheels.

I've made up my mind to buy the Solar Premium, not because of the solar roof, but mainly because it's the only model available with adaptive cruise control. My knee hurts on long drives, so being able to let my leg rest and let the ACC do it's work will hopefully give me more comfort.

 

I WAS afraid to push the accelerator (I entered the highway only a couple of minutes after entering the car for the first time), and was surprised that the car didn't accellerate the same way I'm used to in my current car.
I'm confident that the power is there (the power was there when I put the car in power mode), and that I just have to adjust to the way the accelerator responds.

Exactly, this is the behavior I'm used to in my diesel. I was surprised to experience a completely different (admittedly more rational) behavior with the Prius. I had expected immediate response because of extra torque of the electromotor.