One week with my Prius

Greetings people!

One week with my Prius, 2008 UK spec. Seems largely as I had expected (from test drives etc).

Previously I had very little experience driving automatics. Automatic transmission is quite unusual here in the UK, almost all cars (even new ones) have manual transmission (I don't know how many Americans appreciate this, maybe most of you on this forum though).

Observations I made which are possibly interesting:

• I took a little while to disconnect my expectations of engine revs with the throttle pedal - which of course, on other vehicles is generally quite closely connected.
• At certain speeds it really goes quite quickly.
• I try to drive pretty smoothly and gently mostly - I've found that a good way of driving is to pretend that I'm cycling.
• I am still getting used to the size of the car, Prius has quite a lot of "back" and relatively little "front" for me. It is quite a big car for me (This is not a bad thing; my family like it).
• Reverse does seem a little bit "keen". It seems to move faster in reverse (with no throttle) than it does forward, which seems wrong. I guess I'll get used to this soon.
• I wish the reverse-beep hack worked on the UK version.
• The best way to get good fuel economy is to get stuck behind a really slow driver.
• I have to turn off the "Energy" display otherwise I get distracted by it.
• The "EV" button is very good for sneaking up on unwary pedestrians to attempt to run them over... Not that I do that of course. Otherwise "EV" seems pretty useless. As I understand it, it just makes fuel economy worse.

So far so good!

Mark