Not much, but two of the most common tasks are available. Navigation, is the best system I have experienced. Normal English will let you navigate to addresses, POIs, etc. The other is streaming music. The steering wheel controls are very well thought out. Not as good as the S yet, but close to surpassing it.
I put in my order 2+ years ago and didn't pay a lot of attention to the details...thinking I would just wait and see one. When I could finally sit in one I didn't like it much to be honest. I couldn't see how a touch screen would work smoothly for so many of the things you do in a car besides steer and turn on your turn signals. After going back another time or two and test driving one I was convinced to go ahead...a month later I got the email to order. I've got a dozen little things I wish I could get them to change, but overall it is great. The navigation system far exceeds anything I've used and the large screen just makes it even better. Things like the lights, HVAC, audio are very easy. The lights are just set to auto so I never need to do anything. One tap handles seat heaters, changing temp or turning A/C on/off. One tap to defrost front or back. second tap to change front defrost from cold to hot. Yes the glove box takes two taps compared to just pressing a latch in a regular car. But for this tradeoff you don;t need a key (which most cars don't even have) and you get the security advantage of the valet mode where it can't be unlocked without a password. (When you give your valet key to the attendant you can restrict the speed and acceleration that they can go. And they can't open the front trunk either. With one swipe you see your trip odometers and with more tape you can name them, reset them, etc. One swipe lets you see all tires pressures in psi. Wiper on: one tap...more taps to adjust speed. Audio volume is the left wheel on the steering wheel and side taps on it cycle through your audio. Right steering wheel ball wheel controls you cruise control speed. Even though there are a lot of menus, these are mostly for settings and info you don't frequently use Mike
Flick the other way and you engage or disengage automatic high beams. When in auto they turn on and off automatically...dark areas they turn on...oncoming car they turn off. Mike
The Prius shifter is fantastic, because it always returns to the same place, so the car can automatically go into "park" when you turn it off with the start/stop button. Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.
I doubt that I'd like the "tablet for everything" controls of a Tesla 3, but I'm sure I'd like the way it drives. If I ever have an electric car, as they now exist, it would be to charge at home. Even with the superchargers, a Tesla would not be my thing for 1100 mile highway trips, unless they have 400 mile range, and can charge in a few minutes. Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.
The c model has a traditional gated shifter, and I vastly prefer it because I know what gear it is in by the position the handle is in. The extra effort of having to shift in an out of park hasn't worn me down yet. Confusion relating to gear selection on a monostable shifter has already killed people. I don't feel direly threatened by them personally, but when given the opportunity I'll always buy the gate shifter.
When batteries are free, yes, a basic BEV might be cheaper than an ICE car, but batteries are still expensive. Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.
When I drive my Prius, I just push the "start" button and put the car in D or R as needed. I can easily tell what gear I'm in by the direction the car goes if I have my foot off the brake. That's just me, though. Overall, my favorite shifters are Prius shifters, and 6-speed manual shifters like my MINI. Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.
In some studies, EVs are expected to become cheaper than an equivalent ICE vehicle by 2025. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-22/electric-cars-may-be-cheaper-than-gas-guzzlers-in-seven-years I expect it to happen a couple years quicker on average.
Yep, Toyota will need to do BEV's at some point. They still have best hybrids, with Prius, and the new Camry hybrid which gets almost Prius-like mpg, in a quicker and bigger car. Too bad there's no liftback or wagon version. Still, when Toyota decides to do pure electrics, they can come up with good ones. They need to avoid wierd styling, though, like the current Lexi. Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.
"free"?? really? ok - so by free I'm guessing you mean a battery & motor going into the car as opposed to a cast-iron chunk of iron going into a car, to move it? And by "free" - we don't count the cost of air pollution? or oil wars? or premature death from respiratory failure? or oil spills & other environmental damage? or higher costs @ the pump, versus a home recharge in fully amortized solar panels? or hicher mechanical maintenance costs / ICE vs ev? Yea .... free means different things to different people. How does the old saying go? Nothing in life is free? and that's okay. We fall more in the norm (maybe around the 70 percentile), where we need to stop every 3 hours or so to take a break to stretch or eat or pee - & eat something. It's probably an age thing - because when I was younger, on a few occasions, I would do those massive 1, 200 mile Cannonball runs in only 20 hours. Then I'd have to crash for a day, just to recover. .
OK, by "free," I meant a lot cheaper than they are now. A Chevy Bolt costs about $12-15K more than a similar ICE car, mainly because of battery cost. That is the main reason it doesn't sell well for use as a commuter vehicle, charged at home. Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.
It was leaked that Chevy was paying a little over one hundred dollars a kilowatt-hour of capacity for the Bolt battery. Of course, that doesn't include the cost to assemble them into the pack for the car. Part of the higher costs now is the fact that the EV components aren't manufactured on the scale that ICE ones are. A reason that a parallel hybrid can cost less than a power-split one is because the transmission costs for it is shared among thousands of straight ICE models using that transmission.
My Prius does have the monostable shifter. I have accidentally left it in drive several times, when the shifter has Jedi mind tricked me into thinking it was in park. I am slowing developing the habit of looking for the light on the P button instead of using shifter position, but decades of habit are tough to break. Luckily, I am a very habitual user of the parking brake, so the Prius has never moved unintentionally.
