Disappointing technology

Toyota is alot like Microsoft and other corporate behemoths... They are no longer hungry for innovation, just concerned with profiting off of what they already created. Back when Toyota was selling cars in the early 1980's they were hungry and built the most advanced and reliable cars & trucks ever built in an era.

These days Tesla has proven that being a computer hardware and software developer is more valuable in advancing car technology than being good at auto parts design. So many standards in high quality car design were ignored by Tesla and all the other automakers made fun of them for poor quality, yet here we are today with Tesla destroying the competition by making car's with hardly any conventional auto parts.

Even wiring harnesses have mostly been eliminated by Tesla because robots suck at fishing wires through lots of holes. Embedding the circuitry into the parts solves that problem.

 

the new ones are just as bad.

 

Click bait.

 

If you haven't seen the 2023 Prius Prime, how can you assert that " the new ones are just as bad." with a straight face?

I've spent about 700 hours in mine, and don't see anything worth complaining about. I've driven a vast array of cars, from 1950's Rambler American to both old and new luxury cars. There is not a single feature that I'd trade straight across from any luxury car to replace the equivalent in my 2017 Prime.

I like the features in my radio. Did you know that you can pause the over the air radio and rewind it for a replay? Or that you can save the routes that you drive in the nav system? It's much better than the nav system in my son's cell phone. Now THAT is sluggish and he has to pay a monthly fee too. Or try the Mazda's

I totally disagree with PriusCamper's post. Tesla has been unable to deliver most of what it's promised in the last 5 years. If they had decent mechanical engineers or skilled automobile designers they would not be faced with so many embarrassing mistakes in recent years. It was obvious from the start that permanently embedding batteries into structural members of the car a terrible idea. According to a recent report, a minor rear end collision can make the battery pack unusable and the replacement cost may frequently exceed the value of the car. It's not necessarily as strong or stiff as the original design. Cast aluminum is seldom as structurally consistent or as strong as forged parts, especially when they are cast in an uncontrolled outside environment such as they have in Fremont. Someone at Tesla noticed that, since they say on their blog that the cast aluminum parts are xrayed to locate voids and cracks (flaws) in the casting. Flawed parts are recycled.

And, of course, someone at Tesla should be responsible for making sure that all batteries used in the cars are properly identified as to composition, chemistry and safe handling during recycling. For no apparent reason, Tesla withholds that information from the owner of the car, the first responders and the recyclers. Maybe they keep it secret to protect their monopoly and their profit margins. Maybe they just don't want anyone to know exactly how poorly their batteries really work or how much they deviate from what is in the original design.

I laugh at the ludicrousness of the excuse "Even wiring harnesses have mostly been eliminated by Tesla because robots suck at fishing wires through lots of holes." I know a person who automated a wiring harness manufacturing facility back in 1995. Her company made wiring harnesses for Toyota and GM when they had the Fremont plant. And that was done with micro controllers and servos.

If they can't figure out how to program a robot that can install a wiring harness, what makes you think that they will do any better when they still have to run wires to every part of the car that needs to be controlled or monitored? Don't forget that with a CAN (Car Area Network) the wire must be properly shielded and grounded and you will need controllers embedded throughout the car to open doors, windows, change the radio volume, etc.

 

Different Vehicles use different speed chips. Seldom are the very fastest put in cars. It's like a brand new high-tech tv. Man - those latest and greatest TV's will bring up Amazon Prime or Netflix in just a second, whereas a 2 to 5-year-old TV will drag on - in comparison.
I noticed our plug-in Pacifica is slower to boot up then our same year Chevy Volt. Both of their chips are 3 or 4 years old - yet the Chevy's chips blaze in comparison. It would be interesting to hear from a rav4 prime owner about how fast it boots up. That could very well represent how fast the 2023 Prius Prime will boot up. With chip shortages, who knows how fast chips will be that they are putting in cars now.
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Were the robots assembling wiring harnesses, or installing them in cars? I've found reports of the latter being developed, but no evidence of it actually being used in a factory.

 

It was an interview with Joe Rogan in I think 2019 just after he was done living at the Tesla facility to perfect model 3 production... He explained how they spent a fortune on robots and pretty much had to scrap all the robots on the assembly line that were designed to connect loose wires because there were too many variables. This then evolved into later interviews when Tesla announced in cost cutting measures that things like door panels no longer have wiring harnesses, just copper circuits embedded in the panels so when the panel gets plugged in the wiring gets plugged in... There was also outsider analysis on significant cost and weight saving of this design and ever since I've looked at giant bundles of wires under a Prius dash as an antiquated design.

 

Yes, Gen 5 is better. You would also be upgrading from TSS 1.0 to TSS 3.0+.