Toyota is listening

I would not have bought my Prius if it looked like a previous generation. I felt the old design looked terrible.

 

Yes, its a bit high but I do the same. J

 

Me too! My wife and I use very different seating positions.

The Rav4 Hybrid (probably our next vehicle as replacement for our Murano) has seat memory in the higher trim level. The Prius should also.

 

Wow, they charge a lot up north.

On the Toyota USA site, I just built a Prius Four with Advanced, Premium convenience and floor/cargo mats for $33,350,

A Rav4 Hybrid Limited (which includes seat memory) with Advanced tech (which includes Birds Eye and JBL) and mats for $36.155

So. the difference is $2805 and that includes All Wheel Drive and sun visor extender.

I'm not promoting the Rav4 over the Prius. I want one of each.

 

I'm in the same boat. Had the 2009 era not looked like an egg, I would have chosen the Prius over the Camry. They redesigned the Camry to look less conservative, and I jumped. They did the same with the Prius and I jumped again. Love the new design, inside and out.

 

Yes - it doesn't fit my shape unless I put the seat where I don't want it.

 

That's understandable if the armrest is as badly misplaced as that of the 3rd generation! I do the same thing.

 

Another thing TOYOTA could address is the AUTO PARK - which:

1) PriusChat members have reported doesn't work really well; and
2) Isn't available at all in Australia

 

That's surprising, but we know my biases on the matter. Most Prius sold (Two Base and Three/T) have spares, so perhaps that's part of it. Any sense of how many of the owners even had Two Eco or Four?

A solar roof to cool the interior would be welcome in sunny NM, though I'm sure it would have been bundled into some mess o' gilded toys for the Four as previously.

Big fan of eAWD - I would almost certainly have bought a Prius in '04 if E4 had been offered (got the AWD Matrix instead); one of my big disappointments when Nissan brought the Cube over was that they didn't offer the JDM eAWD option. We didn't buy another new car until after we moved out of snow country, and we have no occasion for roughing it, so the issue hasn't been on the table since.

Electric PB seems a good idea - maybe then my wife would use it! (She hasn't broken a pawl or otherwise discernibly damaged her tranny yet, so cannot be convinced of the necessity).

For those not aware of the alternative, check out an old Matrix (after '04 I think) - a similarly short visor could telescope out along its support rod when pivoted to the side, allowing positioning to block wherever the sun was hitting you (I actually think the feature was designed for the Vibe from the GM side of the project). This was so obviously useful I've never been able to figure out why it didn't become standard on everything. At least one enterprising so-and-so is selling cut sheets of plastic and elastic bands for $20 to fix this (see amazon.com/Gray-Visormates--Window-Visor-Extenders/dp/B002JR949K).

Pretty unlikely.

That's really more like it, though I'd add that new car sales appear to be off across the board. Hybrids have an additional burden, in that car buyers in the aggregate, like most collections of people, act neither intelligently nor even rationally, making a durable goods purchase decision based on this week's price at the pump, and those prices are stupid low right now. I'm not anticipating a collapse in oil supplies, but I do think it more likely than not that during the decade I'm planning to own our 2016, there will be significant increases in carbon taxes, perhaps phased in, that will better align consumer behavior with the need to lower CO2 emissions. That's going to cost the 15mpg crowd dearly, but hey, that's Tomorrow Guy's problem, am I right? Since I don't have to give up anything I much care about to own a Prius, it does seem an obvious choice to me, but that's clearly the opinion of the tiny minority indifferent to the pleasures of tooling around in some PoS faux Humvee.

No argument here. The Prius is a widely-respected engineering triumph, but when you consider overall comfort, utility, and economy, the Avalon Hybrid is the quiet miracle of present day hybrid models. I'm not normally disposed to spend that much on a car but we did entertain the thought in the weeks prior to seeing the Gen4 for ourselves, when we knew we needed a new car but weren't sure what the Prius would be like. For those in that segment, though, the A-H comes very close to a no-brainer. Then again, I suppose no-brains is the norm .

 

Gen III looks terrible? What looks so bad? It looks pretty sporty to me and I love the bridge designed interior, I wish they had kept it in the Gen IV.

 

There's no direction for this discussion to move along in a constructive manner so I'll just say, to each their own. The Gen 3 looks sporty in the same way that a suppository does. I'm not saying the Gen 4 is good looking, but it's a big improvement over the Gen 3.

My biggest issue is that other than the taillights I find the Gen 4 to be plain and boring. It's not offensive to me, but it's dull. I've had the car for two months now and I use it as my near daily driver. I still walk right past it in the parking garage and wonder "where the hell did I put that damn thing?" or worse, walking up to a civic and grabbing for the door handle. I imagine I wouldn't have that issue with a Gen 3, find the ugliest car in the lot, walk near it, make sure no one is looking, then quickly get in.

 

Does this look boring? You can always improve on a cars design, its a blank slate waiting for your input.

 

LMAO touche

That looks like a high schooler was given his mom's Prius as his first car and has spent every cent he makes flipping burgers at the auto parts store finding whatever newest part Lund makes that he can attach with double sided tape..... What's with the Mercury hood ornament btw?

 

Out in California and in Japan, custom Prius are becoming the norm, and it takes $$$$ to make them this way! So you may laugh, but there is an entire industry dedicated to Prius and aftermarket parts. Here I will share some pics, enjoy.