Help: Braking distance and ABS Skid Marks

It has been a while. I might soon get my Prius back, so that I can find out what happened.

My other car is a Toyota iQ. My iQ is slightly overpowered, extremely short and resides in a country with higher speed limits, tricky roads and lots of snow, so I made sure to get familiar with the limits of that car - including when the traction control and ABS kicks in.
With the low speed, long safety distances between cars and general laid back behavior, I didn't spend time on finding the limits of my Prius. This was obviously a huge mistake, which I will make up for once I get it back.
You say the tires aren't very good. They appear to be the same width as on my iQ, but the Prius weight much more. The Michelin tires on the iQ are quite good. Is the same not true for the standard Prius tires?

Thanks. I don't know what he means with "no control", but I will see if I can find his own writeup.

Thanks a lot. It sound like the ABS works quite smoothly in the Prius, and the car should stop rather abrutly as you mention. I suppose the seatbelt motor works a bit smarter with your AT package than in my Prius IV.


As promised, I will take my Prius out on a huge empty parking lot, bribe the security guard and abuse the car until the brakes fade, tires wear out or I hit another lamp post.

 

I have my car back now. It has been repaired, but the brakes are untouched.
Since it's Memorial Day, the parking lots at work are empty - so it was time to test. Here are the results.

ABS:
The ABS doesn't make the noise as in other cars. Actually, you can hardly feel it. It pretty much feels like braking a car without ABS. I have attached a couple of pictures. The skid marks are solid and there are two of them. I simply performed the standard "brake as hard as you can" routine from different speeds. The pictures show the result from 45MPH.

VSC:
The car starts skidding when cornering long before VSC kicks in - I have still not been able to make it go off, but will try again later if I find a place with a larger plain area. Right now I can say that the Prius actually corners pretty well, as long as you don't do it while braking hard (see below)

Off balance braking:
Stuff goes bad if you happen to throw the car off balance (such as with a sudden directional change) before braking. When the weight is biased to one side, the car had a very hard time transferring brake power to the other side. Again. I couldn't get VSC to engage while doing this. This basically forces one tire to do all the work. This seems to be more of a problem with the Prius than other cars I have driven, due to the thin tires.

This is most likely what happened to me when I crashed.


In conclusion.
You don't feel the ABS, but the car still brakes really well, as long as you allow all tires to actually have grip. If you ever brake while being off balance, simply counter steer a little more than what you would do in another car.