I'm reposting something I wrote this morning on PriusChat, arguably the preminant Prius website. It's a detailed essay on my initial impressions of my new 2010 Prius.

Since it was initially posted on PriusChat, it referrs to capricious_k  as "my girlfriend" and miss_emelia  as "my friend."



I've had my III w/ nav for a few days, and I'd like to share my initial impressions. Overall, I'm extremely pleased with this car!

This is my first hybrid, and I've driven stick shift my whole life so I have some adjusting to do. I also occasionally get to drive my girlfriend's Mini Cooper S -- a car with a ton of zip -- so it makes comparisons... interesting.

Driving:

As others have mentioned, the steering isn't as "mushy" as on a Gen2 Prius (I've driven some friends' Gen2s for comparison) and in fact feels like just about any other car to me. It does take slightly more revolutions of the steering wheel to do a u-turn compared to most other cars I've driven, but I don't find this bad or distracting. It's odd, but the steering wheel itself is slightly oblong and not true round -- again not a bad thing, just unusual.

Our first night with the car we took it on a long drive in narrow, twisty hills (up Highway 9 from Silicon Valley to Santa Cruz, for those of you familiar with the area). The car performed very well. Not super-zippy-amazing like a Mini Cooper of course, but not anything like a station wagon or minivan might. This was definitely a situation that called for PWR mode though, and the car cornered much better on twisty roads after I made the switch. ECO mode is not recommended for twisty hill driving.

On the way back (from Santa Cruz to Silicon Valley via Highway 17) I let my girlfriend take the wheel and she proceeded to drive it like she would her Mini. Highway 17 is a somewhat narrow freeway where the traffic was flowing at 50-ish mph with lots of curves, and she found the car performed surprisingly well -- not "whiptastic" like her Mini, but not as far off as we'd imagined it would be! (And for those of you concerned that we were pushing my Prius beyond the boundaries of the break-in driving recommendations, the geography of the road prevented this -- but we were definitely riding the upper-edge of the recommendation).

Around town this is definitely a cruiser car. It's quiet, it's pretty tight (though not as tight as the Mini, obviously). Of the four driving modes (regular/EV/ECO/PWR) I find myself leaving it in ECO most of the time. Frankly, there's usually no reason not to; the only thing I imagine that's wrong with that is me pissing off the people behind me that I'm not leaping off the line when a stoplight turns green.

As I drive around town I find myself looking at the MID too much. I know there's a whole thread on the forum devoted to that topic, and as posters there point out I'll probably get used to hybrid driving style after I've driven the car for a while. I'm definitely driving like a little old man in this car, as I'm quickly getting sucked into achieving the best mileage possible (59.3 mpg is my best so far).

Another thing that will take some getting used to is a sense for where the front corners are on the car. The seat position is very far back from the bottom of the front windshield, and the hood of the car is very steep (part of what gives the Gen3 it's iconic arrowhead shape). One consequence of this design is that the driver can't see the front corners of the car at all. This makes me a little nervous on sharp corners. It also makes it a bit tricky to pull the car all the way into my garage, and several times I've noticed I didn't pull it far enough forward into a spot in a parking lot. This is something else I expect I'll adjust to over time, but for now it's definitely weird.

The Prius' famous blind spot seems to have been reduced from the Gen2. I think it's been virtually eliminated looking over the left shoulder, and reduced looking over the right shoulder.


Looks, Interior, & Accessories:

First off, one of the most fun things about being an early adopter of the Gen3 Prius in Silicon Valley, where the Gen2s are so popular they line the roads from horizon to horizon and are so thick you need a machete to chop through them, is that it's a head turner. In less than a week, I've had a lot of people do double-takes at my car. 

I had a chance a couple of days ago to park behind a friend's Gen2 and we compared exteriors. Hers was definitely more of a bubble shape, and mine was definitely more of an arrow shape. I think mine looks cooler.  Several of my friends and coworkers have told me they think it looks like a space ship -- a look that is only enhanced my the swooping center console between the front seats.

Speaking of that center console, I like it. It's fun, it gives me great access to all the buttons, it doesn't get in my way. My girlfriend appreciates the spot under the console for her to stick her purse. If I was given the opportunity to change one thing about the design of the car, however, it would be the position of the EV/ECO/PWR buttons -- those are simply too far away from the driver, and there's no way to tell which one you're pressing unless you take your eyes off the road to look at them.

The stereo system sounds great to my non-audiophile ears, and it's nice to finally own a car with an aux jack I can plug an iPod into. I'll definitely shell out for the iPod/nav integration when it becomes available. I'm enjoying the satellite radio, but I don't know if I'll actually pay for a subscription after my free trial ends; I mostly drive my 20-minute commute and errands around town so I'm not convinced it's worth it. The stereo controls on the steering wheel are fine, I just wish the Mode button let you cycle backwards through modes as well as forward.

The nav system is cool, complex, and will take some getting used to. It has so many menus that learning to navigate them, especially by voice, will take a while. But it does work well; the other night I wanted to find a Quizno's sandwich shop near my friend's house, and it guided me right there. I was pleasantly surprised it had such fine detail in its database.

Since I've got the nav system I have a backup camera, which I haven't had much use for yet. I left the backup alarm beep set to constant, since I'm a hybrid newbie and I wanted the reminder (which I think will be doubly important when I loan the car to someone else). My car also happened to have a port-installed backup sensor (the person who originally ordered the car had it installed, then backed out of the deal at the last second which is how I got my car so fast) which is more useful than the camera. Parallel parking a new car is always tricky and the backup sensor helps me more than the backup camera. Why? Because the camera's fish-eye lens distorts the image so much that it's very difficult to judge true distance, whereas the sensor just beeps at me to let me know how far back I have to go. Of course, with both the backup alarm and backup sensor, this can lead to a whole lot of beepin' goin' on.

I'm quite happy with my choice of colors. You can see a bunch of photos here. The Blue Ribbon was so very, very tempting but (as you can see from my username) I've got a thing for gray so it was fate. The gray exterior matches very well with the dark gray interior. I also got floor mats, and those also match well (not so awkward as the photos I've seen of the misty gray interior with the dark-colored mats).


Final Thoughts:

Boy am I happy with this car! My last car was a 1995 Honda Civic which I purchased brand new and drove for more than a decade. Unless all of us early adopters discover something horribly wrong with the Gen3 Prius, I expect I'll keep this car for many, many years. By the time I'm done with this car, I hope the next generation of eco-friendly cars (plug-ins, fuel cells, cold fusion, whatever) are into their 2nd or 3rd generation and I'll move on to that happy and guilt-free.