Prius
From Koset
As it happens, I recently had the opportunity to rent a Prius for a week in Los Angeles. Here is my opinion.
Most of the time the power was quite adequate and not much different than an ordinary economy car. The Prius is rated at 87 horsepower and an average economy car is about 125. While those numbers seem quite different, in practice most driving is done at 1/2 of a car's total capability.
Most of my driving was in rush hour stop-n-go on LA freeways. Yes, the traffic there is as bad as you think. The only time I thought I didn't have enough power was when I was merging into 65 mph traffic from a low speed ramp. A semi-trailer came upon me quicker than I had thought. You just have to plan for it more so than you're used to. If you have the opportunity to drive one, make sure you try freeway merging at normal speeds. Surface street driving won't be much different.
As for the rest of the car, Toyota made the user interface different than what we're used to using. I found most of their design decisions different but not better. For instance, the gear shift is more like a video game but does not enhance its usability. Different is good only if it is better. All controls (and I mean all) are accessed through a central computer with a touch screen instead of buttons and knobs, that is heat/ac, radio, etc. It takes a bit of practice to get used to and practicing to use a new computer isn't good while driving, especially when all you want is to make the air cooler. I wished for a simple red/blue knob.
Another concern for me is that the current Prius has a horizontally split rear hatch window. The dividing bar was exactly in the right place to block my view of the turn signals for the car behind me. It made me a little nervous not knowing if the car behind me was going to signal to pass.
One important thing to consider is that critics of hybrids point out that the process of creating and eventually disposing of those huge batteries have a much more detrimental effect on the ecology than most people know. It's not clear whether the total impact is less than a gas engine car or not, though there are enthusiastic advocates on both sides of that debate. Back on the credit column, I heard some statistic that listed the number of millions of barrels of oil that were not burned because of all the collective millions of miles driven by all hybrid cars since they were introduced into general production. Alas, I don't recall the exact numbers.
I'm a bit of a car collector, surely from being raised in Detroit; there must be octane in the drinking water. I was hoping that full-electric cars would have made it to market by now, but I'm convinced the oil lobby has the resources of Midas. Even a max range of 50 miles on a charge would be plenty for most of us, even me, especially for families with a second (gas) car for occasional longer trips. The bottom line is that I'm glad others are buying hybrids in order to fund the R&D and raise awareness of the ecology, but I don't feel that it's right for me yet. For now, I choose to be greener by driving less.
