The Game
The "Consumption" dash display is actually a biofeedback interface. The "current MPG" indicator is visible easily and safely during drive time, providing immediate feedback on behavior. Accelerate hard - no blue bar. Accelerate gentle - big blue bar. Performance is summarized in five minute sample buckets over the past 30 minutes of driving, providing feedback on classes of behavior and terrains.
What becomes apparent with real-time MPG feedback is that the vehicle sometimes gets 12 MPG - accelerating, climbing hills at high speed. It was a bold move for Toyota to expose this operating telemetry, one that reveals the strategic confidence embedded in the Prius itself. Imagine such a gauge in a Hummer.
When I play The Game, I drive differently... ballistically.
Why a Prius?
The personal numbers worked. I was driving a 98 Ford Explorer (an undesired distribution from a divorce), and its was hard to take on payments again. There are cheaper quality cars with near-enough fuel efficiency, so why take on the payments, a new technology, a short-life half-breed? - the lowest carbon emissions of any choice available to me. Any incremental cost to me personally can easily be borne by a most meager sense of global responsibility. In any pay now or pay later deferred cost scenario, carbon will prove to be much much more expensive for our children than it ever would have been for us.
- I vote, as an american consumer, against the corporate interests who control our government. That I can not choose to buy a pure-electric (zero to 60 in a traffic integrating period, 30 mile range, see the Meyers Sparrow) or the Mercedes SmartCar (80 mpg, non-hybrid, available in Vancouver BC but not in the US thanks to the policies of Daimler-Chrysler) has to do with simple, short-term reward, amoral, monopolistic interest mandated market disruption.
- the Prius is a design wedge; its body profile signalling a disruptive change. I saw my first one in its first year in the US, owned proudly by an Intel engineer. In 2006, the current owners seem a mix of frugal progressive elders and mid-aged practical adopters (including myself). I doubt the Prius's uncompromising aerodynamic form will prove to be an enduring hot design. At this point its role is to show itself as a viable choice, with that added leading edge derived from the linguistic association (Latin, "prius" = to go before). The root of the 2006 Prius position - best mileage - will only last one season, though my sense of the competition is that Toyota's engineering is two to three years ahead of the catch-uppers
I haven't enjoyed driving so much..
I haven't enjoyed driving a car so much since that '65 Mustang back in '75.In the earlier mid-70's we lived through the Gas Crisis. There was a moment, just as I was getting a driver's license, that it appeared the whole "american driving thing" was going, ending. Thirty years later, and finally maybe, things will change in a substantial way.
My lust for the electric glide really got started a few years ago during a trip to Vancouver BC. I saw there a museum exhibit of a Meyrs-Motors Sparrow - all electric, good speed and range... and in a museum. My anger really blossomed, a year or so later, when I came across the "SmartCar". A dozen of the buggers, and I would have bought one then and there, had they not been illegal in the US!. You can buy them here from Zap, but not from Daimler-Chrysler (where the standard "we can't make a profit" claim is issued like a droning mantra).
Free market? The marketplace is, as ever, controlled and defined by "the greedy men who rule the world" many of whom may not live to see the climate tip out of its 11,000 year equilibrium, and my choice of a Prius is at its heart a political act.
