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Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

The Prius Prime is definitely a "smartphone on wheels" by any measure. In fact, a lot of people appear to covet the lowest end model because it at least has some knobs for the AC. The upper models force the driver to use an enormous touchscreen with shitty responsiveness and shitty UI/UX.

And at least in the U.S. it has had a 25 mile electric range for the past decade or so. Only the 2023 model claims to have a 40 mile electric-only range, and that hasn't been released yet.

What would be great is if Walmart released some kind of electric vehicle analog to their old Sceptre tv models. Steering wheel, pedals, battery, and of course a flash drive reader that autoplays any mp3s it finds. (Premium version could add a cigarette lighter.)

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I don't want to touch vehicles with full touch screens with a 10 feet long pole. Touch screens on cars just cheaper, look fancier but unusable at all.

Agree. My Model 3 is a usability disaster. Even having hard keys around the edge would be way better, like my avionics.

MFD buttons would actually be pretty amazing.

I have a set from Thrustmaster for my combined driving and flight sim rig, it works really well for mfd input. (F16 mainly).

A set of blank buttons eg at the bottom of the display that could be mapped to in display functions would have been very useful.

(I've gotten used to how it is now - and actually really like it after a year - but not going to say it couldn't have been done better. It would look less minimalistic, however.)

Playing games can hardly have any consequences, but driving does. All those buttons/knobs are designed to minimize the chance you have to look for something. Virtual keys somehow alleviate a little bit as there are reduced physical keys but still, you will probably have to press multiple buttons to do one single task.

Wehn driving, you don't want to move your sight away from the road. Thus, muscle memory is super important. But touch screen simply rendered all that useless.

The rav4 prime has 40 miles on its battery so I wouldn't be too surprised they get the prime out with 40 miles soon.

Doubt it… look at the number of first gen Volts still on the road.

I have a 2015 Volt with 98k miles. Still drives great and charges to full capacity. Chevy dramatically over built the first gen, it was the second gen where they were forced to actually limit their design based on lame goals like "making a profit"

I have a '17 second gen that I'll be selling within the next 3 years. 60k miles on it right now. Gotta sell it before it has a $20k boat anchor on board. Unless something happens and I get the battery replaced under warranty for some reason, then I'll continue using it.

Lifetime 172 mpg over 60,000 miles!

That's kind of misleading. My electric only car gets infinite mpg over 65,000 miles. It's 8 years old.

How is it misleading? It seems to be a standard measurement for vehicles that can move via both gas engines and electric motors.

It gets around 42 mpg when running purely on the gas engine. Based on the distance I have traveled and the amount that I have used the gas engine, it works out to 172 miles per actual gallon used.

MPGe is what you would refer to for your fully electric car.

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