I just got a 2025 Prius Plug in XSE Premium (with advanced technology package, and every premium feature) a couple days ago, and am trying to figure things out? So please forgive newbie questions. Last night I tried the Advanced Park feature. (of which I don't think the manual is clear at all). (So I had also watched a Toyota YT video about it.) While driving down a street late at night, many open parallel parking spaces on my right. No other cars parked. (So not a situation where I would actually use any kind of parking assistance, as a very easy situation for parking, Just wanted to try out the feature.) I pulled up next to one of the spots, braked, and pushed the advanced park button. Strangely, rather than doing the very easy maneuver of parallel parking there, it tried to perpendicular park, started driving up the curb onto the sidewalk on as city street. So of course I cancelled the operation. But that probably was not good for my new wheels and tires, for the car to start driving over the curb! Wth happened? It should have been obvious that the only way to park there was parallel, with marked parallel parking spaces and parking meters. No driveway, , no perpendicular parking space,. How can I prevent that from happening again? Or is the Advanced Park extremely buggy, unusable? (As I am not good at parking in tight spaces, I really liked getting this feature. But it has to work correctly?)
All I can think is to test in a neighbourhood with "friendly" curbs (gently rounded edges, only a couple of inches raise), plus some cardboard mockups for cars, if you REALLY want to play it safe. If you do go through all the above rigamarole, have a spotter record, post a youtube. You'd think Toyota would have tested this better...
This could be the issue: From: Looking into buying used Prius, seeing "automatic parking" feature. Does it work well? Do you like it? : r/prius
It would have been helpful if you had included the end of that post. The part where it says: Why do you think instructions from a car nine years older and two generations back is going to help the OP? It does nothing but confuse the issue. They need to know what the gen5 with TSS 3.0 does, not what a gen3 with TSS-P does.
I've got a 2023 Prius Limited with the same options as yours. Even after two years of ownership, I haven't bothered to fully explore the Advanced Park system. I live in a fairly small city(<10k people), so there just hasn't been a need. I tried it a few times just after I bought it, and it just felt like it took longer to use the system than to just park it myself. I also envisioned the speed of the auto-parking being a problem in a busy city where you really need to get into that spot as quickly as possible and let traffic get past you. So I've always meant to try it out more, but keep forgetting to actually do it because it's so far down my list of priorities. All that being said(to explain I'm not an expert on the topic), I think the problem was that you didn't pay attention to the infotainment screen while activating the system. When you pressed the Adv Park button, the screen should have shown you a diagram of what the car was going to try and do. It would have shown that it was going to do a perpendicular park. You can override that and tell it to parallel park using the screen. Also, I believe there's a setting in the main settings screen(using the steering wheel buttons) that sets the default parking choice between perpendicular and parallel. I think the setting is there to speed up the process if you almost always use one or the other. If I had to guess, your car is set to default to perpendicular parking. When you pulled up beside the spot, the car checked the space and determined it could fit in perpendicularly. It then displayed the perpendicular image on the screen and you didn't override it, so it went ahead and tried. If you had either set the default to parallel before attempting the park, or you had overridden this particular attempt from perpendicular to parallel in the middle, I think you would've been okay.
My experience ... Please put your focus on the rectangular blue box with a "P" (park) symbol that advanced park will present you when the vehicle determines it's found a place to park (something made easier by painted lines or other parked vehicles). That is exactly where the car will park. The vehicle is on the lookout for spots even before you choose to use advanced park so by the time you press that dedicated button it will show potential spots immediately and if not you can creep forward to choose others. That blue box and the orientation of that letter "P" will show you where and in what orientation the vehicle intends to park. So when you agree with that blue spot press the Start button and follow the instructions on screen and watch as it'll show guidance tracks and the target parking position continuously while the vehicle goes through its maneuvers. For perpendicular parking you also have a visual choice to either back in or go forward into a spot (and it'll remember your preference for that direction), Sorry it started out that way for you but don't lose faith. I find it works in a lot of situations and even custom ones where you might want to tell it to perpendicularly park into a home driveway where it will have to go over a low curb. Did I mention the blue box?
