So, I'm up to page 250 or so of the manual. Some component, LCA(?), of Toyota Safety Sense seems to want bare hands on the steering wheel, ie, no gloves. Would this preclude an aftermarket leather steering wheel cover, if you wanted the LCA and/or no warning buzzers/lights? My car will be a DL, without LCA, or steering wheel heat, lol. I found no other mention of the bare skin on wheel requirement for the other Safety Sense "features" the DL has. But I could be wrong. edit: On reading further of the chapter on Driving Support Systems, I sincerely hope that any of them can be persistently turned off if you don't have the need for it. If you paid attention to driving, you wouldn't need most of them.
I should think that any steering wheel cover would impair the capacitive touch sensors in the steering wheel.
Cars with LCA (ie PHEVs/Primes in the USA) have the capacitative touch sensor in the steering wheel. Others don't. So that warning doesn't apply to your car.
Thanks. It's hard wading through all the acronyms. I wonder how the car will be delivered, ie, with all options enabled? Then it would be a matter of figuring out which ones you don't like and disabling them. I guess that would be logical, although the option that stops the car in the middle of the road if it senses you are 'non responsive' would be interesting to test.
Just to confim what's been said, a steering wheel cover will NOT affect your LE. All regular Prius HEVs* use only the steering angle sensor to judge whether you have your hands on the wheel. When you're using adaptive cruise control plus lane tracing assist, the car will give a prompt if 15 seconds go by without the steering angle sensor reading a driver input. Owners of Primes/PHEVs have the capacitive touch steering wheels in addition to the steering angle sensor programming. You can technically still use a steering wheel cover in those cars if you don't mind giving up the touch function and reverting back to steering input only. I've personally had it both ways, so I've probably had more experience with all this than anyone outside Toyota. My car(2023 HEV AWD LTD) came equipped without the capacitive touch steering wheel. I drove it that way for almost two years and 20k miles. I swapped out the original steering wheel with one from a Prime about six months ago, so I've had both steering angle sensor and touch sensors for that amount of time and around 10k miles. *at least in the US - can't speak for HEVs in other markets
