Most Obscure Prius Facts (Way out there)

11 slabs of beer in cans
whats a slab of beer? here we have 6 packs, 12 packs, 18 packs and my fav the 24 pack aka the case

 

the prius uk brochure has two different pictures of the stick shift

the close up picture is the right hand drive stick shift knob

the wide picture of the right hand drive interior has a left hand
drive stick shift

http://www.toyota.co.uk/bv/leads/pdfFiles/...dfSubject=Prius

 

A slab of beer is a carboard carton containing 24 cans of beer. Called a slab due to it being large, and flat compared to a 24 pack of bottles.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(lefat1 @ Oct 27 2007, 03:57 AM) [snapback]530792[/snapback]</div>

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(NicksBlackBrid @ Aug 10 2007, 04:03 AM) [snapback]493377[/snapback]</div>

Just been rading through this thread, very good. However the above poster has been watching too many Simpsons episodes. The only reason toilets in Australia would flush in the opposite direction to a toilet in the northern hemisphere would be the design of the bowl.

 

If you throw your smart key out the window while driving.. your car will keep going. I tried it in a parking lot and felt I had driven a sufficient distance from the key to be out of range and nothing happened... Is this a good or bad thing I don't know? cause like what if your key is in your jacket pocket or purse and you leave it on the roof and it blows/falls off as you drive away? although I don't know if the car will start with the key just outside/on top of the roof..

 

Cruise Control will not engage while you are shifted in to "B" mode. Twice I have wondered what the #3!! is wrong with my CC when I was in B for some reason.

 

Here's a super-obscure fact apparently nobody else seems to know: your gas mileage will go down in cold weather.

 

The salesman that sold me my Prius said this happened to him. He was showing a Prius to a woman, he had the smart key in his pocket and started the car up then got out of the car and let her get in and she drove away for a test drive. She got down the road a bit, pulled over and parked and shut the power off and couldn't get the car started again and had to call the salesman to come get her.

 

uh wow hows that go again?

 

In my 07 pkg 3 there are two buttons that perform two totally different functions, yet they have the exact same label (at least in English).

Can anyone tell which two buttons I'm referring to?

 

Main power and radio power buttons?

 

Ooh! I know this one: Smart button on the outside handles, and the glove compartment "open" button/latch. They both have the same label in all languages: nothing!

 

Oooh, hadn't thought of that. Although that's not too obscure and certainly is not a source of ambiguity or confusion.

The buttons I'm talking about are the "Info" button on the steering wheel and the "Info" button on the MFD. The steering wheel "Info" button toggles the MFD between the Consumption and Energy screens, whereas the "Info" button on the MFD itself brings up the Main Menu. It beats the heck out of me why that is.

Also, I think it would be so much nicer if the (so-called) Info button on the steering wheel actually worked as a Menu button that allows the driver to cycle through all the setup screens (Audio, Climate, etc.) without having to reach over and push the dedicated buttons on the MFD.

 

The radio power button only says PWR, so it is not identical.

 

Operating System

I don't know about "Microsoft Jill (is that her real name, did she start at M$oft and get exported, or did M$oft adopt her from somewhere else).

But to put your mind at ease, the operating system used in the computer(s) controlling the Prius is not one of the Microsoft Windows flavors. Toyota uses Green Hills Software environment, see http://www.ghs.com/customers/prius.html. They don't say which actual RTOS it uses (other than the rough hint of Green Hills C/C++ compilers), probably INTEGRITY and/or VelOSity for the different controllers, as described in http://www.ghs.com/Automotive.html. Both are pretty secure real-time OS's with resource protection (still doesn't always save you from bad code, but light-years ahead of a big complicated OS).

Somebody here once said they wanted to know how to write Java applets and upload them to the Prius, this pretty much eliminates all possibility of that happening. I don't know if this includes the MFD programming, but I assume so.

This is truly obscure I know, but to continue, in theory you could find the JTAG port (if populated in the production version), determine the type of Flash they use and pull out the application code. I certainly wouldn't want to reverse engineer anything complicated like that, however, especially not without somebody paying me by the hour.

 

It will also save your sound settings ie bass mid and trebel. As a matter of fact, I think it will save your sound settings for each component: aux, cd, fm and am.