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

[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.