A few days back I had occasion to drive to New Hampshire and back, and the luck of the draw gave me a new Prius. I really liked driving it (although the seat was not as comfortable as I might have hoped and I really missed our blind-spot mirror). It's zippy and nimble and the control-panel display is endlessly fascinating whether you're monitoring your instantaneous miles per gallon and regenerative-braking score or just marveling at how many options there are for the air conditioner.
It's also a little bit strange for anyone used to driving a normal car and half-consciously sensing the dozens of little clues that engine and transmission give you about how fast you're going, whether you're speeding up or slowing down, just how steep a hill you're climbing and so forth. There's only a distant correlation between engine revs and speed in the Prius -- heck, the motor doesn't even start up till you're doing 15 or 20 miles an hour -- and I kept wondering why there was so much wind noise until I realized it was because there wasn't any damn engine noise at all much of the time at highway speeds.
The whole drivetrain also has very little effective mass, so the car bleeds off speed very easily when you pull back on the gas pedal (unless of course it's going downhilll, in which case it will pick up just as readily. I regularly found myself 5 miles and hour faster or slower than I'd thought I was going the last time I looked at the speedometer (the digital display doesn't help much there either).
Of course the same thing happens in a well-tuned non-hybrid car when you're zipping along the highway, but somehow here it made me think more. The speedometer really was the only thing that connected me to to car's performance on the road, especially in new-hampshire-driver traffic where the guy you start to pass because he's going 60 might be doing 75 by the time you catch up with him. I found myself wishing for a different set of instruments and also wishing I'd read the manual so I could turn on the cruise control. Or maybe a little electronic system that pumped synthesize engine and transmission noise through the stereo speakers.
As cars get fancier, the sense of driving by instruments is probably only going to get more pronounced.
Posted by wallich at October 15, 2004 08:16 PM