No compass direction indicator found in 2012 Plug-in

Charles, its good but to be frank it some times makes me confused !!

 

I've always been baffled and some what fascinated on TV shows when someone make reference to "assailant heading west on..." when describing what direction a car is heading. I have a general orientation to direction in my environment, but wouldn't count on it's accuracy, or if it really matters in daily life? I remember years ago, it wasn't uncommon to see a car with a compass stuck to the dash or windshield (visualize a "older" couple) like we see a GPS today. What real purpose did they serve?

 

If you are stopped the gps heading isn't accurate

Mike

 

Right. GPS can only infer a heading if there are several distinct location fixes; i.e., you were at location L1 at time T1 and location L2 at time T2, so you moved at some heading at some average speed between those two points. OTOH, a magnetic compass just points to a magnetic pole, and your motion, if any, is irrelevant.

 

hey brackson, welcome to priuschat, all the best!

 

How difficult is it to install the homelink mirror?

 

I had the home link mirror intalled by Carson Toyota before I picked up my PIP

 

You're welcome.

 

Wife's Venza has a compass in her Homelink mirror. It is useful when you use floating maps like on her GPS and you just want to know when to turn left or right but you are not quite sure if you are going East, West, North, or South. Back-in-the-day, ooo boy here we go, my Dad always had a compass in the car and helped with my Mom as the navigator (trying ?) to read a map. Me, I used the Sun, or stars, for both time and place and calculated the amount of time in my head how long it would take based on my speed. I wasn't much of a conversationalist when I drove long distances. And when I wore a watch, I always had a stopwatch function built in so I knew exactly when to make a turn. Yeah I was that obsessed and talk about distracted driving......


iPad ? HD

 

You don't have to visualize any longer!!
"Older couple" has in fact installed a magnetic compass on the dashboard of our 2012 Prius and it works PERFECTLY. The compass is accurate once the compensating screws are set correctly (a simple analog process) and it operates even if the car is TURNED OFF! (Collective gasp from Me-Phone generation.)
Seriously, we see no deflections due to current flows in EV, ICE, or regenerative braking mode, so this is a feasible solution at least for the basic Prius and it should work in the PIP.

Take that, whippersnappers!
Now if I could just find the engine crank to start the car after I retard the magnetos , I'd be all set.

 

You do celestial navigation in your head whilst driving a Prius?? My hats off to you but like your Dad I will still use a magnetic compass to give an approximate direction. Not sure how well it will work in Alaska but will report on that next summer.

But my wife grew up in Hamburg, a town on the Elbe River, so the only directions she recognizes are, and I quote directly:
"Towards the Elbe,
Away from the Elbe,
Elbe upstream,
Elbe downstream."

Now that works fine for her, but it turns out that the River Elbe shifts from flowing East-West to flowing North-South right in the middle of the city of Hamburg, and those directions drove me absolutely bonkers.

So we bought a German GPS at Aldi, but then my wife disagreed with how it was routing me through Hamburg, so suddenly I had two female voices yelling contradictory directions to me in German whilst coping with the local traffic. Had to turn off one or the other, and it was a close call, but I finally decided to turn off the GPS.

 

Good call- always go with the wife when deciding to which female you are going to listen.

 

To be a little more precise...and it's not common...but there have been a few times when I know the general area in which I'm driving...but not a specific way out of it. For example, I've found myself a bit "lost," but that "road x" is a major north-south road that is somewhere to my "east," and once I'm on "road x," I'm good to go. So basically I don't particularly care which road I'm driving on, so long as I'm headed "east" so I can eventually intersect with "road x."

Some days you can use the sun/shadows to give you an idea of direction, or you can closely observe the orientation of the ubiquitous satellite dishes on people's homes (typically pointed south in the areas I drive). But on cloudy days or obviously at night, not so much.

With smartphones and in-car GPS units (I've not had any problem using either in my tinted standard 2012 Prius) this situation has become an anachronism. Even in the most isolated rural areas I travel, it doesn't take much driving to get enough of a GPS signal to get a phone-based compass reading, if not a full-on map.

Now I'm remembering that Grandma had a HUGE compass on the dash of her Buick (as plenty of older folks still do in my area). She could never explain to me how, specifically, she'd ever actually use it, or had used it. I suppose it gave her some feeling of security/control...