Green Cars

[bcholmes]

The New Democratic Party (NDP) of Canada recently started promoting a policy on green vehicles. David Suzuki supports it. When I bought my Toyota Prius back in 2000, I learned that David Suzuki purchased the first Prius delivered to Canada.

In other news, I can tell I'm driving far more than I'm used to (driving almost every day to a customer location north of, well, anywhere reasonable). I had to fill up the car twice last month.

Comments

re: green cars

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i would _really_ like to buy a greener car than our ford pickup, but whilst working on the boat the pickup is too darn useful. i've actually been thinking it might well be worthwhile for us to buy a second car, and make that as green as we can, and only continue to use the truck for hauling.

what do and what don't you like about your prius?

Re: green cars

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

Things I like

• This is the first car I've owned with modern conveniences (like door unlocking thingamajigs)
  
• It has a display on the dashboard that tells you about its power consumption. You can perform interesting little experiments with how, for example, the heater affects gas consumption.
  
• I was afraid it was going to feel sluggish. Far from it. It drives really well. Although I notice that when, for example, I drive a rental car, they feel too jerky.
  
• I find it an all-around comfy car.
  
• It took me a long time to get used to hearing the engine shut off (my brain immediately thinks that the car has stalled), but now I find it comfortably familiar.
  

Things I don't Like

• The dashboard has a number of "map/position locator" widgets that don't do anything (Toyota apparently didn't offer the service in Canada when I got my car)
  
• Siobhan finds the car to be built for shorter people. She finds the chairs uncomfortable.
  
• We've had one major technical problem (recall, we bought the release 1.0 model) involving the wiring harness, and the dealership wasn't well-trained about resolving it. Basically, service is the big annoyance. For a while, only a few people at the dealership were trained to service the Prius, and they had problems figuring out the implications of that, a la "So why did you give me an appointment at 8:30 AM if your Prius-trained mechanic doesn't start work until noon?" I got uber-warrenty on the car, because it was such a new model, and that's prevented it from costing me anything, really, for repairs. But it's frustrating dealing with lack of expertise from the dealership.