After three days, I have to say that I don't really like it all that much. (Cue hatemail from Prius owners.) I'm not saying that it's a bad car, or even that I hate it. I'm just saying that I really don't see what all the hype is about.
The main problem is the rearview. There's a thick plastic spoiler that divides the rear window into a tilted upper part and a straight lower part. This means that, when I look out the rearview mirror, I see three separate pieces: the upper glass, a black stripe, and the lower glass. So I can't really get a good view of the road behind me.
As if that weren't bad enough, the headrests from the back seats impinge further on the view, as does the rear windshield wiper. Plus, the two panes of glass are tinted slightly different colors. All of this means that I really have to do some serious work to piece together a full picture of the road behind me. It's really annoying. And when it comes to changing lanes, it's not just annoying, it's dangerous. And when it comes to driving at night, the plastic spoiler is in exactly the right spot to block the headlights of the car behind me, so I can't even tell if there's anyone there. Majorly bad design.
The sideview mirrors make up for this to a certain extent, but the glass on them appears to be somewhat warped, so that I get a distorted view. I'm not sure whether this by design or accident, but it's a bit like looking in a funhouse mirror. Not helping.
I know some people are really jazzed about the sleek, technology-heavy interior, but it frankly leaves me cold. In order to do anything in the car, like operate the radio or check my gas mileage or adjust the heat settings, I need to interact with the touchscreen in the center of the dashboard. Frankly, it's a pain in the ass, not to mention distracting. Call me old-fashioned, but I like my physical buttons and dials. I like being able to reach right over and turn a knob to turn the heat up, or push a button to toggle the air recirculation. I'm sure that I could get used to where the controls are on the Prius given enough time, but that's not the point. The interface should be more intuitive than that.
To try to address this problem, the designers did add physical buttons for some of the most common functions --- on the steering wheel. So now, every time I change my grip to make a turn or something, I inadvertently turn on the rear defroster. Seriously, there are a good dozen buttons on the steering wheel, and another dozen features that I get to from various stems coming off the steering column, and I can't manage to keep them all straight. Again, I could learn, but I shouldn't have to.
Sure, it gets good gas mileage, but so did my (possibly now-defunct) Honda Civic Hybrid. And one of the things I really liked about the Civic is that the hybrid functionality was seamlessly integrated. I never had to know that I was driving a hybrid if I didn't care to; I was just driving a car (admittedly, a car with extra-grabby brakes that would occasionally shut off when I was stopped at a red light). But the Prius really wears its special status on its sleeve, and not necessarily in a good way. It also shuts its engine off at red lights, but with a little shake and shudder that feels somewhat ominous, like the car's decided to give up. It starts with a push-button, which is cool and novel, but it doesn't really start like a normal car. It turns the electric components on first, and then, after a few moments of me wondering when the heck something is going to happen, it turns on the engine. Putting it in park also involves a push-button, which sets me on edge a bit, although I can't fully explain why. But I can explain why I'm annoyed that it lights up an orange icon whenever it engages the antilock brake system: I already know that I'm driving in the snow, and I'm already tense enough because I can feel the car slipping, so does it really need to blink this symbol at me and distract me further from the task at hand, namely keeping myself from fishtailing because Philly has not seen fit to salt the roads?
Anyway, as I said at the start, it's not that it's a bad car, it's just a bad car for me. Partially that's because of the things that I've already pointed out, here but partially that's because it's not my own car, which I love and which I've been driving for close to eight years. I'll hopefully find out her fate tomorrow; stay tuned.
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