Annoying Toyota hybrid advertising.

carsfan2 wrote: »

There’s a woman on the radio that tells me a few times a day that she’s basically saving the planet driving her three kids to school in a Toyota hybrid. Another man says he has the price of a holiday every year saved by driving one.
Am I alone in finding these ads very annoying?

DaveyDave wrote: »

Not too sure. The official combined figures on the Prius is something silly like 3.3L/100km (85mpg!) But I've read it's closer to 5.5L. I've also heard it's crap on the motorway. All hearsay and forum talk though..

EdgeCase wrote: »

The current generation Prius gets me Cork to Dublin and back and two days driving around Dublin on €40 of petrol.

They're not bad at all on motorway driving. You have to realise that Ireland's not the Netherlands and isn't totally flat. So it's using the hybrid drive to pick up energy and release it as the road inclines and declines. It's smoothing out the motorway in terms of energy.

You'll also get maximum efficiency by driving smoothly. If you keep hard accelerating, you burn a lot more fuel. That's true of any car but it's very much pointed out to you graphically in the Prius.

You tend to moderate your driving in urban to become very much smoother than you would in a normal car.

The current generation is also very zippy, there's a 1.8 petrol engine combined with electric drive which gives you huge torque at low speeds and it's the responsive and extremely quiet to drive. It's very hard to get used to the rough gear charges of manual or regular automatic transmission after driving it for a while. The Toyota system effectively is a continuous gear. It also does seamless start stop of the petrol engine. So you don't have that awful jolt that loss of power you get at traffic lights with normal start stop systems.

The other nice feature is because it's electric you can manouver at almost no speed / any slow speed for precise parking or getting into tight spaces. There's no "jolt" and no minimum speed and no biting point. It just responds to any accelerator press, silently and smoothly. It can provide basically full torque electrically at any speed because an electric motor can do that far better than an engine sir to the nature of the technology. Piston engines can't reduce their rotation as flexibly as an induction motor which has huge power at any speed.

All in all its a very refined drive system at this stage.

You get people online slagging the Prius but it's actually a very nice system. Also a family member yas an 08 Prius that's going since new without any reliability issues whatsoever. Probably the least trouble car I've ever encountered. No major repairs, no faults, no big service issues, very cheap and widely available spare parts compared to luxury brands and so on.

The only thing I would fault them with is the tail light design on the most recent models. It looks greatand extremely slick from the front and weird from the back. Very odd design.

They're a phenomenal piece of engineering when you look at the engine design and what it's doing and how reliable the whole thing is.

It is a stopgap technology but, burning petrol is just less emission prone because petrol is much more refined fuel. You'll never have issues with particulates, need for complicated filtration and all of that. Squeezing more and more out of diesel, which is simply a “dirtier” (less refined) fuel, was very much a cruder stop gap in comparison.

Wildly Boaring wrote: »

Don't usually listen to the radio.
Had missus' car last 2 days.

This ad has been wrecking my head.

The environment would have been far better off if you'd driven your last car into the grounds rather than using massive resources to produce a new car!!
Appreciate some have to do a school run bit majority could walk, bike, bus.

Yet man saving a holiday a year ditto. The depreciation you're being hit with compared to that of an older car = minus a fairly serious holiday.