Trying to drive a whaleyboy car is confusing! Wait, you’re probably confused about what a whaleyboy car is, aren’t you? Around here we call the Toyota Prius a whaleyboy car. We do that because TW made fun of me when I finally voiced my desire for a Prius. She says it’s ugly and looks like a whale. Fine by me, I can be a whaleyboy, the guys who drive the whales according to Chris Moore’s FLUKE (a really great book, by the way).
Anyway, those things are confusing! First, there is no key. There is a little square box that looks like any normal remote locking thingy for a normal car. You stick that thing in the slot and you push the power button. But you have to have your foot on the brake or pushing that power button is going to get you nothing but a few lights on the dash.
After you’ve pushed the power button, the only way you know for sure the darn thing is “running” is you see a READY light up on the dash (which is really FAR away from where you’re sitting compared to regular cars). The thing is so quiet, you truly do not know it is on.
Then there’s the shifter. One little knob and when you push it into “gear” it hops back into it’s “resting position” and stays there til you shift into some other gear. Scared the heck out of me. I thought I didn’t do it right and was trying to force it to STAY in the reverse position. While you’re backing up, it’s helpful that there is a constant beep beep beep til you shift into another gear. This helps you know for sure that it really is running because that READY light just didn’t feel like enough proof to me.
Confusing!
Shifting into DRIVE was no big deal, once I got use to the shifter bouncing back to it’s resting position. Parking was something else entirely. The shifter indicates NEUTRAL is directly to the left of the resting position. It isn’t. It’s left and a wee bit UP but not too far up ’cause that drops you into reverse. I never did master neutral but I came close doggone it. After it’s in neutral you push a button with a big P on it, which means park. Not to be confused with the POWER button which has to be pressed after you push P for park to shut down the magic, errr engine.
And if all of that isn’t confusing enough, there’s a gear marked “B” – what the? I got my driver’s liscense when I was 15, almost 30 years ago, and nobody ever told me there was a gear called “B”. According to the user manual, it’s what you use if you feel like the regular brake isn’t giving you enough “braking power” – my dad said, oh like a downshift. I don’t know. I was afraid to try it.
Weird!
And then the display, wow. This really big computer screen that tells you how much gas you’re using, (when it says 99.9mpg while you’re driving it is really sort of freaky), tells you how much battery you are using and has little cars to indicate how much you’ve recharged since drving. You can make it display everything in English or French (hmmm no Japanese, odd eh?) and you can change the display colors from green to blue to beige to something else I can’t remember. (I chose green ’cause it’s Christmas ya know) And there are a zillion buttons for air conditioning, which is also the heater, and a zillion more buttons for the sound system. I shudder to think how many more buttons would have been there if we’d rented the one with the DVD screens in a zillion locations in the car! Did I mention these buttons are all on the TOUCH computer screen and not normal dash buttons????
FUN!!!
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