PRIUS MASTER REBOOT DRIVER

Speaking about the hack that allows Prius owners to use the navigation system while driving, Kwong added, 'It is hazardous. But we don't encourage consumers to do that.' 'There are people out there who have hacked into the system,' said Bill Kwong, a Toyota spokesman. So ideas are passed back and forth.įor its part, Toyota recognizes that some Prius owners will want to hack their cars, but the company doesn't condone the behavior. 'The early (Prius) adopters were typically a very high-tech crowd, and there were such long lead-times (to get a Prius) and short supply,' Watson said, 'that they grouped together, and it became a pretty tight-knit community. Other hacks include making it possible for a Prius to drive mostly on battery power and in the process get nearly 100 miles per gallon, and driving an American Prius in all-electric mode at low speeds-a standard feature on European and Japanese models.Īnother hack makes it possible to use the car's onboard navigation system while driving, something that is impossible on a Prius right off a showroom floor.ĭave Watson, president of Coastal Electronics, which markets several Prius modification kits, said that the hybrid car owners generally have the know-how, motivation and connection to other Prius owners to search for the latest hacks.

It was very much like that, and I loved the idea of people figuring it out.' Beta testers in a game will have a 20-step sequence for finding an exploit, and they're bizarre, bizarre sets of steps. 'It's quite a few steps, and you have to turn the car on and off, and you have to get the sequence right, (but) it was a piece of cake,' said Pizer. So what do you do about it? Pizer took advantage of what she said was a relatively simple hack. 'It's not something they advertise (and) whether it's buried someplace or not, I don't know,' said Patricia Pizer, a Los Angeles video game designer and Prius owner.

PRIUS MASTER REBOOT DRIVER

'With hacking the Prius, a lot of it is looking at your energy consumption, and a lot of stuff in the Prius is latently available, because the Prius has such an advanced computer system, but much of it is not available to the driver until you start messing around with it.' 'People want environmental technological solutions, and they want them faster than the market can necessarily dish them out, so they take things into their own hands,' said Gordon. Jacob Gordon, a writer for the online publication Treehugger who has covered several kinds of Prius hacks, said that today's high gas prices and widely publicized energy crisis mandate such behavior.

So your hot-rodders are going to be your hot-greeners.' Now, instead of getting more horsepower, it's about getting more miles per gallon. 'In the 1950s, it was all about getting more speed. 'It's the new breed of hot-rodders,' said Phillip Torrone, an associate editor at do-it-yourself tech journal Make Magazine. But unlike early generations of car buffs, they're more interested in saving the planet than winning a drag race. They're the do-it-yourself Prius hackers, many of whom likely are more comfortable in front of a computer than in a garage.

Heaven knows, Prius owners love their hybrid cars.īut some of the most passionate among them are finding there are certain factory-set features they don't like, and they're increasingly finding ways to take matters into their own hands to change them.

Prius master reboot