Arizona road trip on a rented Gen III

We wanted to rent a Prius for a 8 day road trip in Arizona, so I called up many Toyota dealers near the Phoenix airport. I wanted a dealership that had a pick up shuttle, and no one except Riverview Toyota offered that service. So, I picked them. It was $35/day which I thought was pretty good. There were cheaper places little ways away from the airport.

Everything went smoothly in the beginning. They even called me around the time we landed in PHX. We got a pretty Grey 2011 as our rental. It had 14k miles. I was informed that the shuttle service doesn't actually work for rentals, and how I was given wrong information in the beginning. Since they promised, they picked us up.

DH drove the first few hours. When I switched, I noticed that the inside rear view mirror was not staying at its place. After a few hours, it fell. So, we drove for 8 days without a mirror (it's really not that difficult in empty AZ roads).

The driver's side seat belt was very uncomfortable for me. It was touching my neck. May be there was an adjuster that I didn't know about.

Then we found out that the right side windshield wiper was not working. Fortunately, it was AZ.

The trip was awesome. We put 1600 miles on the car and got about 50 mpg. Our average speed was about 65-70 mph, sometimes higher on the interstates. We hit Phoenix rush hour traffic and I conveniently hit the HOV lane. There weren't very many vehicles on HOV lane, and DH commented 'All these cars only have one person? This country is doomed'.

I don't know which package we got on the rental, but we didn't have a backup camera or trunk door SKS. We did however have JBL speakers and bluetooth. I still like my Gen II better .

So, last day, we were supposed to bring back the car by 3 pm to get the shuttle back to our hotel. It took us 2 hours to find the place. The GPS didn't have their address listed and their instructions on how to get to the dealership was awful. So after talking to them for more than 5 times and them giving wrong/confusing information, we finally got there few minutes before 3 pm. (I take responsibility for not printing detailed maps of Phoenix, but didn't think people can be that bad giving directions to a visitor).

Then they informed us how their shuttles are busy and they cannot drop us at the hotel. When asked for cab services, they weren't sure which cabs there are in the area. Finally someone called "clean-air cabs", which was another Prius! So, we paid for a cab and got dropped at the airport. Overall experience was ok, but I wouldn't rent a Prius from them again.

At Monument Valley, we took this 17 mile unpaved, BUMPY road. Who needs a 4WD when you got a Prius!

 

Yes, it has huge ruts in the beginning (to scare away potential visitors so we buy their jeep tours, haha). But it gets much better after the first mile, still very bumpy. DH drove, since I am a wuss in this type of situations. We saw two convertibles on that road, so a Prius can certainly handle it. The Magnetic Grey Prius was looking like Barcelona Red towards the end though.