The Prius V and Its Entune System

See what The New York Times had to say about the Prius V

When our 12-year-old minivan finally gave up the ghost, it was time to go car shopping.

I didn’t want another minivan; driving around a gas-guzzling seven-seater didn’t make much sense when 98 percent of my trips involve one child and one driver. I definitely didn’t want an S.U.V.; in the 18 years I’ve lived in Connecticut, I have yet to encounter a flash flood or a sudden mountain on the way to the grocery store. Yet I wanted something roomier than my beloved Honda Fit. I love it, but two of my three children are now teenagers, so it has become a tight Fit indeed.

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I finally settled on the brand-new Prius V, which is an enlarged Prius.

Toyota’s always been the leader in hybrid motors, and I’ve always loved the regular Prius. The Prius V (pronounced “vee,” not “five”) is something like a crossover Prius. To my children’s delight, it has as much room as a small S.U.V.; the back seats offer 30 percent more space than the regular Prius, and they even recline.

I think it’s a great-looking car, too; Toyota finally eliminated the stupid support bar that used to block the back window. And the ride is perfect.

Of course, you’re not going to go zero to 60 in five seconds in this car. But it gets 44 miles a gallon and produces one-tenth the pollution of a regular car, which makes me very happy.

Best of all (for a technophile like me), the Prius V is the first Toyota to incorporate a new electronics system, Entune. The concept is brilliant; the dashboard touch screen offers buttons for apps like Bing, Traffic, Weather and Pandora radio that connect to the Internet through your phone. It works with iPhone or Android phones, as long as you’ve downloaded the necessary Entune phone app and signed up for a free account.

For days, though, I couldn’t get the system to work. I’d paired my iPhone with the car’s Bluetooth system in seconds, so I could play music and make phone calls wirelessly with no problem at all. (A nice touch: your Bluetooth music fades and pauses when you get a phone call, even when you’re not sending the phone call through the car’s sound system.) But whenever I tried to use one of the car’s apps, I got a message that said something like, “No connection to the Internet.”

It took some Googling to unearth the bizarre glitch. The Prius can see the Internet connection only when the iPhone is wired to the dashboard’s USB jack. It can’t connect over Bluetooth. (Android phones, on the other hand, work wirelessly.) Toyota indicates that it will fix that iPhone-specific shortcoming shortly.

Once the problem was solved, though, I saw the potential instantly. Once I entered my Pandora name and password, I could tune in to any of my custom-made “radio stations” as I drove (with a watchful eye on my monthly Verizon data limit, of course). I could see the gas prices of nearby gas stations right on my dashboard, without having to pull off the highway.

Wildest of all, Entune works with the car’s GPS system. Whenever it’s guiding you to a destination, it uses your phone’s Internet connection to download traffic data, and it spots coming traffic jams before you do. Suddenly, the dashboard screen might say, “Traffic jam in 2.1 miles, average speed 10 m.p.h.” You’re offered two buttons: Accept and Detour. That’s right; with one tap on the screen, you can direct the Prius to find its own way around the traffic jam.

I wish I could say that it always works. I’ve seen this message five times in the two weeks I’ve owned the car. Twice, the phone brilliantly guided me around what turned out to be awful traffic snarls, and I cackled with superiority. Once, the traffic jam seemed not to exist. Twice, I tapped Detour but the car kept me on the main route (maybe there was no usable detour).

By the way, the GPS system is a mixed blessing. It’s the first built-in GPS system I’ve ever seen that lets you speak the entire destination address to enter it: “Destination 1283 Maple Avenue, Flemington, New Jersey.” No more slow, tedious tapping away on a sluggish touch screen. And I love how the screen shows you replicas of the actual green highway signs in front of you (“I-95 North, Right Lane Only”) when it’s time to change lanes or take an exit. When there’s a cluster of them, it dims all but the one you’re supposed to follow.

Unfortunately, unlike my Fit, this is one of those cars that locks you out of the GPS system if the car is in motion, so your passenger can’t input a destination as you drive.

Worse, the screen updates fairly slowly — maybe one frame a second. In other words, it’s sometimes behind real time, which is the kiss of death for a GPS system. Over the weekend, I missed a turnoff because the screen showed that I hadn’t reached it yet. Oops.

Like most modern cars’ ambitious electronics systems, this one requires some learning and some studying of the incredibly wretched user manual. There are plenty of typical car-company baffling interface decisions and error messages.
Over all, though, the Prius V’s Entune system, which will soon be coming to other Toyota cars, puts a lot of useful power in just the right places. The idea of using your phone to provide the car with an Internet connection is simple and brilliant, although Toyota has yet to exploit it beyond a few very basic functions. More apps are on the way, the company says.

And considering the wonderfulness of the car itself — big, beautiful, roomy, incredibly fuel-efficient — Entune is a worthy embodiment of the cherry on top.

Tags: 2012 Toyota Prius V, Entune, Gas saving, more moom, Prius V, toyota
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