Just replaced our 2010 with a 2018

For the first time in 8 years, we went out the other night to start the 2010 Prius and it wouldn't start. All kinds of wonky things on the displays -- I suspected the 12-volt battery. Jump started it, and everything seemed to be okay. But while we were at the dealer getting the 12-volt battery replaced, we figured that 8+ years and 90K miles was about time to get a new car.

Not that the 2010 didn't have more life, but there have been so many nice improvements over the years and the 2010 was a Three, with no nifty features and I'd been wanting several things like radar cruise control, a backup camera, etc. (To be honest, I really wanted features like the Bolt's video rear-view mirror and 360-degree view, and the Volt's 50-mile battery, but our Prius is great and we really, really like our dealer. Plus the infrastructure's not there for EV-only vehicles.) So we traded it in for a 2018 Four.

Expected and unexpected things so far:

++ Mileage has taken a significant step up. Wow, I never really got the mileage on the 2010 that I'd hoped for, so the 2018 is a pleasant surprise. We have a four-hour-roundtrip day trip that we take once or twice a month, and I'm looking forward to see what we can do.

++ I've never really used cruise control. I was slightly excited about radar cruise control, and it's exceed my expectations so far. This is the cruise control I've always wanted. (Again, looking forward to a road trip.) My only improvement suggestion would be that I wish it would work in stop-n-go backups. That's the thing I hate most about driving.

+ Handling and performance are better. (I may actually be underestimating it, since I'm trying to account for comparing a new car versus an 8-year-old car.) Ride seems better.

-- I had assumed that it would support Siri's maps. (I know some people mock Apple's maps, but I've had great experience with them for years now. It does better than my friends' Android alternatives, and looks nice.) The navigation looks 20 years old, but does seem to work reasonably well. I don't really care about apps, but ugly maps are ugly.

+ Seat. rear-view mirror, and steering wheel adjustments are nice. Wish the seat had a memory, but that would be out of the price range, I guess. Outside mirror adjustment is also improved.

+/- I really got used to the Gen 3 display. You can sort-of replicate it, or maybe improve on it, but I don't feel like I have as much information in as compact a form. On the other hand, it does look like the pretty graphic does show you a lot more of where power's flowing.

+ My wife's always paranoid about headlights being on when the car's locked. We park in a garage, so don't usually need the illumination, and I could turn it off in the menu settings. Car off, headlights off, no worries.

+ The key fobs are a bit larger and I hope that they have larger batteries. (I get more "FOB batery low" warnings than I would expect.) Moving up to the Four, we also got fob entry on three doors, which is nice.

- Storage space lost. I eventually found a place for everything in the cabin, but now have some jackets and other things stacked with the picnic blankets and chairs in the back.

++ The A-pillar visibility is better. (This was a surprise to me.) That and the cross-traffic warning are really comforting. I've scared myself a couple of times over the years when a pedestrian was crossing from the left at the just the right pace to be continuously hidden by the A-pillar as I (slowly) approached the crosswalk! (Probably scared the pedestrian as well.)

+ I figured the HUD would be gimmicky. But one nice thing about it is that it's apparent focus is much farther away than the console, so it's clear without reading glasses on. It also works nicely with navigation turns.

+ A small thing, but I really like the LED lights when they go to high beams. Like a shutter being opened. I first saw that in a relative's luxury car, and it's just a cool effect. The auto headlights seem to work pretty well, so far. Don't feel like the old days where they sort-of, basically worked and were really only for old people -- though now maybe I are an old people.

- Parallel and back-in parking assist. Was cool to try. (Never had problems doing either task manually and the backup camera is a bigger help.) First time trying in my garage parking space, which has a fairly large pillar on one side of the space, between me and the next car, and it really looked like it was going to back me into the pillar, so I aborted. It's a bit too hard to abort, really. On another occasion, it started to parallel park me in a back-in situation. (Admittedly, there were two spaces between two cars, so it was somewhat confusing for the machine.) More stress than it's worth.

+ Other small improvements include: brief flick of the turn signal blinks it three times, dealer can turn backup beep into a one-beep warning, battery/signal strength of bluetooth-connected phone displayed, Qi wireless charging, etc.

 

Good question. I did consider it.

My mileage was higher until about 5 years ago and may increase again. (I walk to work now, but we're going to take more car trips in the next few years.) Also, it would cost a fair amount to run electricity to our parking space, two stories underground. (Live in a condo.) And 25 miles is very not exciting. If it weren't for monthly longer trips now and more travel in the near future, I'd probably have pushed hard for a Bolt. Also, the 2018 Prius we got had a sunroof, which the Primes didn't. (Didn't investigate if it's not an option on the Prime or just none on the lot.0

 

That's good news, then. My impression was that it would handle traffic that went from highway speed, to slow, to stop, then back up to highway speed, but might not work so smoothly for traffic that varied from stop to 10-20 MPH and back to stop, often creeping ahead, for 20 minutes at a stretch. If it handles a backup well, I'm really happy. (Actually, my highway-speed testing seemed to indicate that the minimum distance is about 3 seconds -- which is what I was taught when I learned to drive. Perhaps 3 seconds is a little far in an actual backup. I read elsewhere that it's more aggressive in maintaining the minimum distance in Power mode and if that's correct I'll probably try that as well.)

 

Wow, thanks everyone! Sounds like the DRCC will help a lot with the end of trip, when we get back into town and hit backups. To me that's the most stressful part of a trip. You have to maintain an unreasonably-high state of attention for an extended period of time and just a little lapse would result in a fender-bender.

On the other hand, two of three accidents I've ever been in were the other person's fault. One of those was when someone in front of me slammed on their brakes on an interstate because of a truck tread in the road. I stopped -- no DRCC to help me -- but the person behind me was looking over their shoulder to change lanes and hit me at full speed. Unfortunately, it would be pretty expensive for me to buy new cars with Prius-like safety features for all of the other drivers on the road. (The third accident I slid on ice and hit a tree, so I guess I could blame the tree but that feels like cheating.)