A New Driving Experience

It’s been a decade since I bought my Soul and seven years before that when I bought my Civic and five years before that I was driving an Element. Before that was a Frontier and a Sonata. I’m basically trying to get across that I’m not done with a car until my mileage is in the middle hundred thousands. This may be the last car that I own.

The number one reason I selected this Camry was for its advertised mileage. Its hard to pass up cutting your fuel bill in half. Although I admit some skepticism. But I’ve filled my tank four times and each has the calculated result of achieving fifty miles per gallon. Some back-of-the-envelope math says that I’ll save about 40% compared to last year.

The number two reason is that cars have advanced a lot. My Soul didn’t have a backup camera. My Civic didn’t have satellite radio. My Camry has both and something called Safety Sense V3. There are so may bells and whistles, I feel like I’m driving with a copilot. It’s always scanning to avoid collisions (PCS w/PD¹). It has a cruise control (DRCC²) that keeps me in my lane (LDA w/SA³) regardless how curvy the road gets (LTA⁴). It keeps me from tailgating (EDSS⁵) while safely following the car in front of me (PDA⁶). It posts road signs onto my dashboard (RSA⁷) so I can tell if I’m speeding or in a school zone. And it adjusts my running lights, headlights and hi-beams (AHB⁸) to keep me visible.

The upshot here is that if I’m going fast enough, I can set the cruise control and it will safely follow the car in front of us, accelerating and braking to maintain the same relative distance and nudging the steering wheel to keep in the correct lane. If traffic comes to a stop, we stop. All it takes is a nudge, touching the ‘resume’ key, to start up again. I find myself using it on city streets, in stop and go traffic. I have my foot hovering over the brake pedal the entire time. I mean, liking something and trusting it are two very different things.

The steepest learning curve is with the dashboard. It has a lot going on. Every subsystem has its own lighted icon, white when it’s available and green when it’s active. The center has the tachometer. The center of the center is the speedometer. And below the speedometer is the Multi-Information Display. It has seven pages of data that I can flip through. This is also the least intuitive aspect of the car. I’ve got a whole info display page for eco-driving. It’s designed to let me know things like my currant miles-per-gallon and whether I’ve been aggressively accelerating or braking. Then there’s the dynamic cruise control display page. It shows all the safety sense systems working. It’s followed by the radio/infotainment page. And then the trip odometer page. Then. next to last, there’s a whole page of settings and settings within the settings. With the final page being labeled as “Notifications”. I guess this is where I would find recall and manufacturers notices. There aren’t any. So, I’m only guessing.

Although there is an icon on the dashboard for every system, they are somewhat randomly placed. On the left is one light in the middle left zone that just says ‘ready’ The clock is top right. The temperature is top left. The car odometer is bottom left. And a questimate of how many miles you can travel on the remainder of the gas in your tank is bottom right. The gas gauge itself is middle right. While the engine temperature is on the middle left. There’s a middle right light that comes on in red when you start the car that says “Check Back Seat”. It also always goes off after thirty seconds. There’s a cluster of cruise control icons on the right under the clock. There’s a grouping of engine lights on the left under the “Ready” light. It really is a very busy display. I wish I could move them around. But it is what and where it is.

So far, I’m enjoying the ride.

1. Pre-Collision System with Pedestrian Detection (PCS w/PD) * is designed to help detect a vehicle, pedestrian, bicyclist, or motorcyclist and provide an audio/visual forward-collision warning under certain circumstances. If you don’t react, the system is designed to provide automatic emergency braking. ↩︎
2. Dynamic Radar Cruise Control is an adaptive cruise control system that is designed to be set at speeds above 20 mph and uses vehicle-to-vehicle distance control to help maintain a preset distance from the vehicle ahead of you. ↩︎
3. Lane Departure Alert with Steering Assist. is designed to issue an audio/visual lane departure warning if an inadvertent lane departure is detected. If the driver does not take corrective action, the system is also designed to provide gentle corrective steering for lane-keeping assistance. ↩︎
4. Lane Tracing Assist uses the lines on the road and/or preceding vehicles to provide active driving assistance and help keep the vehicle centered in its lane. . ↩︎
5. Emergency Driving Stop System (EDSS) is designed to monitor the driver’s inputs, such as steering operation. If the EDSS determines the driver is not attentive and the driver does not respond to prompts to resume control of the vehicle, it can bring the vehicle to a stop under certain conditions ↩︎
6. Proactive Driving Assist (PDA) * provides gentle braking into curves or gentle braking and/or steering to help support driving tasks such as distance control between your vehicle and a preceding vehicle, pedestrian or bicyclist. ↩︎
7. Using an intelligent camera, Road Sign Assist (RSA) * is designed to detect speed limit signs, stop signs, Do Not Enter signs, yield signs and certain warning signs, and display an icon of the sign on the Multi-Information Display (MID). ↩︎
8. Automatic High Beams (AHB) * are designed to help you see more clearly at night. At speeds above 21 mph, the AHB system is designed to detect the headlights of oncoming vehicles and taillights of preceding vehicles, then automatically toggle between high and low beams accordingly ↩︎