Don’t Touch the Controls!
One of the dubious benefits of having a leased car is getting to drive a different car whenever it has to go to the garage for something. (This time, a cracked windshield.) The one car I actually enjoyed was a Prius. All the others were meh, including the Toyota Corolla that I have at the moment.
One of the more annoying things about this car is the gearbox. Automatic transmission has been around for many years. The interface is pretty much standard by now, and car manufacturers need a pretty good reason to mess with it. One such reason was the addition of tiptronic gear changing (which the Corolla also has). So why has Toyota gone and changed the interface from the usual Park/Reverse/Neutral/Drive/1/2/3 pattern?
For starters, Park seems to have been removed. And “E” seems to have replaced Drive. (Any idea what “E” stands for? Me neither.) Reverse and Neutral are still there. And M with plus and minus is pretty standard for tiptronic shifting. The numbered gears have gone. No need for them when you have got tiptronic shifting. (And this transmission has five gears, so this is a good solution.)
But the most mysterious thing is the big button marked “M-MT Es”. Pressing it does not have any obvious effect. Nothing lights up. The behavior of the transmission seems unchanged. In fact, it is impossible to tell if it is on or off. For all I know, it may have more than two states. (The label seems to suggest that this is the case.)
If you know the answer to this mystery, please tweet or mail me. I am genuinely curious about this. (One possible explanation that I can think of is that maybe here in Israel we get cars with localized labeling for some non-English-speaking European country…)
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Shouldn’t it be the other way round?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to have floor 0 (ground floor) at the bottom instead of the top?
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