Prius v Test Drives

Don't ask how I know but in a hard corner u turn, and turns in general, I honestly felt it handled like my 'regular' 2010 Prius. I was quite impressed with what Toyota has done with the vehicle.

As for braking, it braked fine. I may have had to press harder, or it took ever so slightly longer than my 2010 but honestly just 'driving it' I commented to Linda on a few ocassions how I felt like I was back at home simply cruising around in my own Prius...

I also noted that driving the base v compared to the fully loaded v, the car had to work a bit harder off the line same as when I drive my Prius V with AT compared to driving my dads III. Is it enough to warrant not getting a loaded v? Hell no.

 

I was the low 'scorer' in the test drive. 3 of us in the car and I pushed it pretty hard climbing over the mountain to the beach side and not babying it at all on the streets. Still finished with 40.3mpg in mostly city and semi-rural driving (no freeway). We also stopped for a bit so the ice cooled down and was restarted, but mostly it was the mountain that screwed me as I was over 43mpg just prior to that climb.

I intentionally took some curvy roads at high speed and felt the handling was quite impressive. It's still not a vehicle that would appeal to me personally, but it is a winner as far as design and performance goes and anyone in the price and category would be foolish to not give it their full consideration.

 

I tried to do a bit of swerving within my own lane at freeway speeds, and actually observed the EPS providing less assist during the "back and forth" oscillations I was trying to induce. I did this multiple times, and found assist during the initial steering effort, but the assist almost completely disappeared, and in fact, almost fought my efforts to "mess around". Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any good corners in the amount of time I had to really test handling.

As for the steering wheel, I was told to the contrary that it did NOT have SoftTex wrapping because of deadlines. I didn't miss it though, and felt the rubber wrapping was adequate for grip and comfort.

 

It felt like a rubber coating - it is soft and energy absorbing. Think like Gen II.

 

On the prototypes or for the final version?

That compares with 44mpg in "city" driving as per the EPA. Somehow, they're underestimating the capabilities of the Prius v.

 

It was demonstrated to us, yes. It still seemed to have a few kinks, but I was impressed by the ability to do voice searches for Bing on the higher-end Display Audio version, and Pandora seems useful (it buffers up to 4 songs at 32kbps, less at 64kbps). Sadly, I think carriers introducing capped data plans makes the proposition slightly less valuable, and being tied to broadband data makes it less useful during long trips or in rural areas.

I was more concerned about how it drove and just listened to Satellite Radio and tried out HD Radio on a local FM radio station (KROQ - yes, you can hear a difference). I did appreciate that you could split screen between NAV and energy monitor or audio.

They didn't have screen resolution specs on-hand, but the larger screen definitely looked sharper than our curent screen. Can't wait till these systems hopefully make it into the existing Prius line-up.

 

Same here, I was impressed at how easy it was to use Pandora and I Heat Radio and how good it sounded. Also, other apps such as weather, stock info (if you need that in your car) worked great.

Interesting thing was in the lower end radio which had a touchscreen, it uses your phones data plan to do weather, stocks etc. While in the premium radio with Entune it uses a subscription to XM in order to get this info. I had to ask, why should someone who spends less on a radio get services for 'free' without having to pay for an XM account. Answer? Seems you'll get free XM service when you get the high end Entune setup, possibly a few years.

Also, the radios we used were still prototype units so that has to also be kept in peoples mind when we talk about what we saw and used. Like Rick mentioned, we weren't given specific screen resolutions but the visuals looked great. The high end hdd entune radio has higher resolution than the smaller unit, and I think it was a 7.1" screen.

Overall, comparing both systems to the nav in my 2010, they are great units and I think people who get either system will be quite pleased.