Repost of Saturday's Entry

Many people have had trouble with my very first entry, made on Saturday evening, January 28. It comes out as Dingbats text unless it's pasted into some other program--like this Wordpad that I'm using right now. When I made that first post, I typed it directly into the window at blogger.com. Subsequent posts were composed in Wordpad, and then pasted in. I'm going to reenter that first post of mine, and I'm using Wordpad to help do it.

*************************

Saturday's post.....

A new car is a new adventure. This one in particular. I drove down out of the mountains to Colorado Springs today and picked up a 2004 Toyota Prius from AAA Autosource, which is a service that finds and buys cars for AAA members. Red with 28,000 miles, the normal accessories, and the GPS navigation system.

I'd wanted a Prius for a while, whether it saves much money or not. After the cost of purchase, it won't for a while although I have lots of driving to do this year. But the technology of the thing is fascinating and I'm not one who steps back from change. The instrumentation inside the car is stupendous! I don't yet know how to use most of it.

There's a display screen in the upper middle of the dash, where one function graphically displays real time power usage. Consider the wheels--is power going to them, or coming from them? The electric motor acts as a generator during coasting or braking, and electricity therefrom is sent right back into the "power battery." Also, the electric motor operates in concert with a smallish gasoline engine, both in accordance with second
by second instructions from an onboard computer. The power battery is shown--sometimes with a good charge but sometimes quite low depending, in this part of Colorado, on the terrain

This flow of power from one device to another is what gets displayed on the screen. Lines with arrowheads on them appear, disappear, or reform in the other direction, depending on what's happening within Toyota's "Hybrid System" at the moment. It's all very fascinating to watch.

The steering of the Prius isn't quite as smooth and light of touch as the steering on my 1998 Subaru Impreza, which I just sold to my girlfriend. This is probably because of the Prius' front wheel drive. The power seemed to surge a little, but this was probably just my inexperience with the car. All in all, Prius is a fine vehicle. I'm glad I bought one.

More another day, about the Prius' amazing GPS navigation system. And there's much else to learn and report about this groundbreaking car.

On Sunday, my girlfriend and I will be driving over to Colorado Springs to bring my truck home. Hey, this is Sunday already! I'd better go get some sleep.