"as for reclining the back seat, remember, the drive batter has to go somewhere, and it's right behind the back seats, so until they figure how to put that under the car or somewhere else, the rear seats probably won't recline. fortunately, as the driver, you don't have to suffer that problem...."


"Dreamer" (2007 Prius Pg#5) has a place to store the batter (cuts on both sides of the storage tray on top of the spare) permanently if you want. As far as further reclining . . . I don't know, guess not. It is designed like this in order to abate the seats for bigger cargo area instead.

 

OK you geniuses out there -

How many of you have found the GPS (or whatever it's called) is pretty whimpy in that it doesn't handle street (house) addresses well. You want a KOA campground - a motel - restaurant (if it hasn't closed) no problem.

My house? Forget it. It seems, I would guess, about 90% of the time it will not be able to come up with that house address.

Can one get an upgrade?

centrider

 

buy a Garmin and don't buy a NAV for your car. i bought the Prius option for nav and everything else, and when i told it to find my home in NC, the pinpoint spotter was off by about three houses. it also didn't know about some road work done years ago. so i bought the new DVD last year and.... it had both of the same errors in it...

funny thing is: maps.google.com pointed to the exact same (wrong) spot! go figure. it also didn't know that Leesville Road had been redirected, straightened out, cutting off the Old Leesville Road dogleg until about a month ago. the rerouted road's been like this http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=e...,0.026994&om=1 for a good number of years.

however, the latest google maps do show the rerouted (straightened) roadway, but my house a mile or two south of there still gets a pointer thats a few hundred feet away.

high tech? up to date? go watch Star Trek...

at least with a hand-held, you can sell the old one to someone and they can upgrade their older model and feel good about it and you can use the money to upgrade to a newer model. and it doesn't cost you hundreds of dollars for a DVD that's got the same old errors on it.
is the Prius a "low end" model that doesn't get updates as fast as, say, Lexus NAV systems?????

 

Well, it's too bad I paid for the NAV and it's on my '06 Prius. It never found my house. What worked once in a while was to use the first address, i.e., 4300 which would get me almost there, and than place the address in memory.

I was impressed that it found all the restaurants we went to in Vancouver, but couldn't find our B&B.

I notice that Google Earth has look-down views which go back to the late 90's.

It's interesting that Garmin can solve the problem, but a major auto co. can't put the pressure on its supplier to solve these problems. Maybe they (Toyota) should use a Garmin system.

Thanks for your response.

Sorrry for any misspellings

 

big amen on that!

here's my "rocket scientist insight" into your question....

toyota makes cars. the cars have lots of electronics in them. that doesn't in any way mean that they really understand the electronics business and what consumers want from the electronic things they buy.

it is, i believe, a kind of in-breeding, where auto engineers ask other auto engineers how to solve problems or provide solutions, and the answers are generated not by someone with experience at Garmin, or Sony, or HP, or Lenovo or their ilk, but answers that come from other automotive engineers and thus pass through their own prejudices and filters.

i once designed a piece of software for HP, where i used to work. i approached it from the "what would the user expect to see on their screen when they use the package" and what information they need to supply in order to get the kind of answers the software could provide.

i designed something like 65 or 75 "computer screens" for the input and output and labeled each field where data would go in or come out.

i showed the pages to a "database architect" and asked her to review it and tell me if she could design a database to sit behind the application. after a few minutes of reviewing the screen drawings (i'd done it all freehand on 8.5*11 paper) she said, "sure i can; you already did it for me with your screens and labels. i just have to code it."

so, you can imagine how i felt when i first tried to use the Prius NAV screens. time after time i kept asking, "why do they do it THAT way?" and "no, that's not the next logical step!" and so on.

when they fix that "way of thinking" they'll maybe be able to compete with Garmin and their other competitors. until then, i'll recommend to my friends to never buy a NAV system built into a car they buy.

and maybe some day, someone at Toyota, or here, or somewhere else, will be able to tell me why the nav system "stops giving directions" at what seem to be arbitrary times. "she" just shuts up. even with a nice blue line on the nav screen, and little blue arrows telling me where the next turn is, there's no "voiceover."

and then, one day, there is....!

maybe they're really running Windows 3.1 inside!

that would go a long way towards explaining it!

 

Well, for GPS system, we got Garmin Street Pilot C330 from our old car and use it in the Prius.

This depends on how we do it, okay ?.. computer/electronic system.. is not human brain, I can find my home and our relative addresses wherever we go. -- I did not have such a problem yet BUT not newest adresses --July, 2006 addresses for instance, you will not find it.

Detour roads/ undercontruction areas, our GPS made us drove around the block and back to the same road again.. This is not too bad.

The good part of our Garmin StreetPilot C330 GPS helped us to drive on the routes which less traffic.. This is good.

Restaurant/lodging are built in system.. you'll agree that you can find it.

IF, you want to locate street in the TOWN that you want,, TRY to use local names that you can find everywhere in the US such as MAIN Street, First St, OAK St for example.. These are steet names that can lead you to downtown very easily. Just be creative to use GPS,

GPS programs are made up by human brain...

By the way, when travelled, if you can stop at the GAS station, get local phonebook and check addresses.. this alos help you.

For me, I don't have proble with GPS eventhoug it 's the old one. We may buy the Garmin 660, or C550, or C530 with V-8 map --> new version. This may you a little bit.

 

took the prius from raleigh to greenville and back today. my wife printed out a mapquest route and we plugged the greenville target address into the prius' nav and the garmin.

the garmin sent us on a road which didn't even show up on the prius' map. i could tell the road, a 4-6-lane divided interstate-sized thing, had been there for "a while" because the concrete surface had already been regrooved to smooth out sections of it, and paint markings were just about faded out. but as far as the prius knew, we were driving through farmers' fields.

it goes back to my previous suggestions and complaints about "automotive engineers".... the car should store the maps in battery-backed-up RAM and be upgradable via bluetooth or USB. and it might not have to run WinXP to do that, either, so all of the "gee, wouldn't you be afraid of viruses getting in" are red herrings.

depending on how old you are, you may or may not remember that radial tires and halogen bulb headlamps were in common use in europe years and years before they even became "legal" in the USA.

some of that's the "gummint's" fault, but here, i blame NIH (not-invented-here) and other parochialisms on the car companies. there are so many easier and cheaper ways of doing things, if they'd just open up to them.


ah, that felt better...

 

Hi.. Thank for your reply.. That's great ..

We jsut do almost the same thing by using map quest .. research correct address and routes.. However, what I did is IF I do not remember the address.. When we went to see my aunt last December at Hanoverton OH, we remember only she lives on Bethesda Rd..I would come up with the number that close to her address and type in GPS. So, I just typed 13000 Bethesda Rd.. The GPS will show a couple addresses in that area too. So, we follow the GPS lady in the dark and we found her house. This technique will led to to that road that close to her house. But you have to remember how the house look like. ha ha... this the way we find the place.. too.



Needed improvement...

I do not like to by built in system that much when it's screw up.. it will led to other complex situations... even though user friendly feathures.. I won't bother it.. If we do not understand the system quite well..

For me, not too cheap and not too expensive.. there must be universal device that we can use to upgrade / update the system. Garmin has V8 map (new version). In fact, I did reserach that Garmin C330 map updated map can be downloaded too. I found out once but did not get a chance to do so.

For me, new, newer, newest devices may not compatible with old window versions.. I wouldn't bother that until we know what is what.. ??? What I mean here is that, for instance, if Window ME or 98 were basic requirement for MY BoogaAA, I would reconsider whether or not our window XP could accept whatever we want to do with the old version of my BoogaAA that worked by window 98..

Viruses.. It needs to be consider 10 times, 20 times.. we will not know what we get into it.. There are bad people who has nothing to do or get bored in their life can do such a thing like that..

Otherwise, we may end up with buying again a new one and spending more money because we want a newest version.. This make the company happy.. their products can be sold, make more money.. Think twice...It may be their strategies.. ha ha...

 

LOL! but what i meant was: if the NAV system doesn't pass any information to any other part of the car, it can't screw anything else up. and if someone wrote a virus for a Linux or whatever version, the worst it might do is erase the NAV data or ouput bogus directions, so a virus scan and reload would fix it, and you could do that from home over the internet. not at $2-300 a year at the dealer's...

and the folks who created the NAV data would have a strong interest in making sure that you get bug-free and virus-free information downloaded, because their livelihoods would be the ones depending on it.

maybe Toyota could outsource this to Apple, and they could sell an "iNAV" or "iCAR".....

 

My wish list of additions/changes:

I agree the R and D are counterintuitive. When I push up, I would think it would go forward not back.

Again, I agree. I can rarely resume my speed without the cruise control forgetting the speed. By the time I realize it I'm going 5 mph below where I started.

I would also like Lumbar support,
Ipod compatible touch controls and display on the MFD,
The electric only button (like what's on the Japanese and European models),
Doors that lock when placed in drive,
A "video/audio in" for viewing on the MFD (not for watching DVDs but for other add ons),
The ability to plug the Prius in.

Something related I would like to see, but not on the Prius, is a GPS with a video/audio out for viewing on the MFD without having to buying a built-in Sat Nav.

I realize these are thing that are available after market but they some of them would void the warranty.

I also love my Prius, but improvements are always nice. I hope someone from Toyota is listening.

Thanks.