A mind of its own

I guess I was bored, but have been thinking about this for sometime and guess I figured a lazy Sunday afternoon might be a good time to get it out of my system.

Plus, and this is a weird omen, or something. The T.V. is on and there was just a commercial about sending Toyota a story about your car, or something like that. I’m not sure this is what they had in mind, but maybe I’ll send it to them. Recently, like two years ago, Gma and I bought a Toyota Prius. The reason for this is gas was headed to like $5.00 a gallon and we just signed up a couple of jobs in Los Angeles and figured it would pay for itself.

Well you know how that works. We no sooner said こんにちは to the Prius and the price of gas started to come down. I guess that’s the story of my life, so I figure the world owes me for bringing down the price of gas. Please make your donation check to……., oh well.

This is in no way a knock on the Prius. Just want to point out some idiosyncrasies.

First of all there is a back-up camera to see where you’re going (not so strange), but also a back-up alarm. Now this is not so unusual in itself. There have been back-up alarms on construction equipment, garbage trucks, and things like that for years. What makes the Prius unusual is that the alarm in on the inside of the car, not the outside. I guess I don’t fully understand the Japanese, but I guess in Japan, the fact that objects in the windshield get smaller as you back up is just not clear enough of an indication of the direction of travel.

This is doubly strange because many times when you back up, the car makes no noise, as there is enough energy in the batteries to allow it to move without the engine starting. I’ve backed up several times and noticed surprised people getting out of the way as the car silently backs out of a parking space. Perhaps some Toyota engineer is a descent of an ancestor who helped plan the sneak attack on Pear Harbor. Who knows. Now a way around this would be to open the windows and turn up the radio, or perhaps lower the window and scream, “Look out!” as one begins to back up.

The backing up issue would not, in itself, be enough to examine the quirks of the Prius, after all, anyone can make a mistake.

An even more interesting characteristic to the car is the navigation system. This is really a very cool feature, but on occasion can reveal the vehicles secret personality.

There is a very cool button on the steering wheel when, after being pushed, asks what you want. No, not 3 wishes (that would really be cool!), but for a “command”.

The most used command we use is the word “Home”, and this will usually (depending on background noise, invoke directions to our house). Very handy if you’re in unfamiliar territory, like downtown in a large city. But as I mentioned, this can depend on background noise. We have become used to exchanges like “Home” (us) then “Searching for banks” (car), or “Home”, then “Pardon” (the car is very polite, a Japanese trait for sure).

Imagine if these were built in Detroit. “Home” – “say what?” “Home” I said, a little irritated. “You better chill honkey, less I dump your skinny a** someplace in the hood where you never get home from!” Scary, but could happen.

Last week Gma and I went downtown on a date for some Italian food. Imagine our surprise when on the way home, the car blurted out “searching for French restaurants”

First of all, if the Prius had any brains at all, it would realize that we were still quite full of pasta and bread. Secondly, if the car wanted to stop for a snack, I would have thougt it more natural for “Searching for sushi bars”. So that left me guessing some.

I’ve come to realize that the Prius has the ability to cause us some real grief, so we’ll be real good about keeping the oil changed and the car washed!

I said "Hamburgers!"

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