Rant: What makes the Prius a great car for gamers

If you watch my Twitter feed, you know that I recently picked up a Toyota Prius. Buying a hybrid is something we've been considering for about a year, and our research suggested the Prius was the best fit for us. It has very good gas mileage (averages around 40-50 mpg) and - thanks to several years of refinement - seems very polished and reliable. And despite its compact size, it has a reasonable amount of trunk space.

Little did we know what a great car it is for gamers. With the right mindset, driving a Prius is something of a sandbox game! Though if you think of it as a gaming system, it does make the PS3 and even some high-end PC rigs look quite reasonably priced. Probably not the right approach to take when trying to sell your non-gaming spouse on one.

The Xbox connection
Before we get into the gaming aspects of the Prius, it's worth noting that we bought the car at substantial savings using Xbox Live Diamond, a free discount card offered to paying Xbox Live Gold subscribers. While perusing the offers online (most of which require a printed coupon, grumble grumble), we found a local Toyota dealer that had a special cardholder price for hybrids.

We picked a Prius with a global positioning system (GPS) since the discount brought this model into our price range and narrowed the difference in cost to about $1000. And we're glad we did, since the GPS adds a real sense of gameplay to driving.

GPS = Great Prius Sandbox
One of our favorite activities is to select a destination and then drive off the proscribed route into a neighborhood to see how long it takes for the GPS to give up on the old route and chart a new one. On the highway, the car may chastise you to turn around for several exits before relenting and calculating a new path. In other cases, it may find a valid detour in just a few seconds. This is handy when you hit a patch of traffic and you're convinced that there must be a better way to go. You'll find out if you're right by how long it takes the GPS to re-route you!

You can also play the "where's the nearest park" game. Simply head out to a new neighborhood or far-flung destination and then ask the GPS to find the "Nearest Park" (or coffee house, restaurant, movie theater, or dozens of other categories of destinations to suit your mood). It's voice activated, so all you need to do is press a button and speak. You can also watch points of interest as they appear on your map while you're driving.

This brings up another amusing detail. Due to the increased risk of accident from watching the GPS screen instead of the road, when you start the car you must view and accept a warning screen. It's sort of like if you needed to agree to a Microsoft end user licensing agreement every single time you turned on your computer.

Touching is good
Even the Prius models without the GPS now have a touch screen, which makes tasks like tuning the radio or adjusting the air conditioning a bit like playing a DS game. The car also has lots of techno-cool features, such as:

• Bluetooth phone integration with speaker, so you can dial, answer and talk on your phone from your steering wheel. People in the backseat won't be heard on the other end unless they really shout, but this doesn't stop our 4-year-old from trying.
• Auto-sensing locks, so you don't even have to push the buttons on your keyless entry remote. Simply standing next to the car and gripping the door handle will unlock it, and the car starts with the push of a button. Just leave your keys in your pocket and you're good to go.
• A rearview mirror that senses and adjusts to block glare, so you don't even need to flip it up or down to subdue the headlights from the hulking SUV behind you.
• Trunk cam that shows you what's behind you on the dashboard monitor whenever you put the car in reverse.
• A power outlet and mini-jack auxiliary audio input hidden in the hump between the seats. Though it lacks full iPod integration (i.e., remote control), it does make it easy to play audio and keep it charged and hidden. The power outlet shuts off automatically when you turn off the car, so you won't run down the car battery.

That driving game
All of these high tech touches are nice, but my favorite part of driving a Prius is actually the meta game: driving efficiently. The hybrid engine works by capturing energy when you brake to charge the car's electric drive system. Use too much gas and not enough brake, and the car will eventually need to burn even more gas just to keep the battery charged. Brake carefully (no hard stops) and often, and your car will charge up more quickly.

Here's the really cool part: Your battery status is actually represented on screen by a HEALTH BAR. Most of the time it's blue, but when it's nearly charged to the top it turns green. (If you really suck at this game, I suspect it turns red.) While driving, I find myself frequently flipping between the Map and Info screens using the steering wheel buttons to see how well I'm doing. The car shows you what your mileage rate is at that particular instant and your rolling average. There's even a screen with historical data to show how you're doing now vs. 5-30 minutes ago.

I don't know what happens when you completely max out the battery health meter, but I kinda expect it will prompt me for my initials. Now all we need are some online leaderboards.

Go ahead. Just try to beat my high score, dude.

-=Gamewatcher