Thu, 26 Apr 2007
I like the 2007 RAV4. Inside, it is a very clean design with no frills. Minor objections:
- Power for MP3 player connected to car battery, which introduces high pitches whirling noises into the audio. Not sure if that is a function of the MP3 player's electronics or the car. Wherever the solution lies it would probably be an excellent business.
- The seat belt alarms are facist, especially the passenger side alarm. If I put a heavy backpack on that seat, after about 20 seconds it is bound to continuously alert me to the fact that my backpack is ostentatiously refusing to buckle itself up. Feh.
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I went car shopping this weekend, determined to cast off my old SUV ways and head into the bright future of hybrid technology. Without question, I was going to buy a Prius. The dealership had my color, had my package. Everything was set. I had test driven it once, loved it. Tried it again, loved it again. So I bought it. After I left the dealership in my new Prius, I went to pick up my wife. She was a little hesitant about the car at first, for good reason: it didn't seem to fit our physical bodies very well. And after a few hours in the car, we found that her feelings were correct. The car was just too small for my long-legged frame. And then the back pain set it. There was absolutely no lumbar support whatsoever in the seating. The chairs were angled so as to drop the hips well below the knees: very bad ergonomics. The base of the seat had hip supports that were way too angled that actually put direct and uncomfortable pressure on the hips. Needless to say, soon we found ourselves in debilitating pain. We couldn't even drive the car after a while!
So we ended up making the painful decision to go back to the dealer and trade in a day old Prius with 40 miles on it for a 30 MPG (not bad) RAV 4 in red.
The tragedy of it all is that we were ready for a Prius. We were ready to support our world as an environmentally conscious voice. It's very upsetting that the world would not support us back.
[/Technology/Automobiles] permanent link
