Gadgetory

I'll be honest with you like most electric cars this one yeah kind of didn't have to exist it was mandated by law in California not by consumer demand anywhere but let's see if a shotgun wedding can actually produce a happy marriage in this case between Toyota and Tesla as we drive the rav4 electric and check the town okay the big headline on this car of course is the fact that it's a Toyota with a Tesla powertrain the other interesting story here is this electric vehicle is not built on the latest rav4 which is radically different but on the outgoing most recent rav4 and of course it's got a big old battery slung underneath it which shows if you look in the back that you're not gonna have any impediment to cargo carrying or passenger space inside now spot one of these guys by the different face obviously it's almost Gorillaz electric badges abound all around it you might spot the little lower ground clearance it's like an inch or so maybe two inches depending where you measure it and the fact that you'll probably be standing in California if you buy one because that's the only place they're sold talk about screens we've got plenty of them here one two three all LCD no gauges no dials the one in the center the instrument panel pretty basic electric stuff you've got range and charge level on the left along with that arc that tells you if you're dipping into power or regenerating in the middle is your speedometer odometer gear position selector indicator but there aren't really any gears it's a different thing and that big blue ring says you're in normal mode that guy turns to red when you're in sport mode we'll talk about that at the moment on the right is a multi display you roll through that with this button on the right and it's going to give you a driving range indicator efficiency trip efficiency Eco coach you get the idea co2 reduction all these things that are electric powertrain oriented that's the IP now let's go to the climate control this is all new for Toyota notice as I go through temperatures it kind of rolls them through cool little animation there as I raise or lower the temperature and that screen is all of your climate control system including level of eco nests now this means I can go to four different settings of how aggressive the climate system is Eco low it's gonna buy us a little more toward power savings Eco high it's really gonna store power savings personally I'd rather that be figured out by the car there's a little bit too much in terms of levels of settings from me to worry about but we're at that kind of gimmicky era for electrics so I'm not too surprised okay now to the main show the big LCD here now an 8 inch so big they had to get rid of dedicated buttons there aren't any everything is on screen now well save for one you've got a home button here I'm surprised Apple hasn't sued them yet that's just like on an iPhone or an iPod or an iPad first off they break up the media across an endless number of buckets radio is under here which includes am/fm satellite and HD radio on those same tabs you can go over to USB for a thumb drive or an iPod bluetooth streaming auxilary jack as well now you're into the Entune apps which are still kind of class-leading being open table pandora movie tickets iHeartRadio and unique on this vehicle a charging station map that's where you're gonna find out where the nearest charging stations are if the damn thing would ever work which it won't which brings us back to the navigation system in this car which we've seen before on Toyota vehicles except it's got a couple of different tweaks first of all here is a split screen with energy efficiency taking up part of the map if you want it to but you've also got this evie menu down here which will give you a range map and this is kind of like a sonar around your current location that will show you in that big blue circle roughly how far you can go as the crow flies that's not the same as driving distance before you are flat out of gas hit it to round-trip and die cuts it in half so they've woven a number of Eevee centric features throughout the different screens however oddly enough on the navigation map you still have a set of POS that include gas stations now one choice on the sound system as there tends to be in electrics and plug-ins it's not going to be a huge power big thump and multi sub system because that draws a lot of current instead up here you've got this sort of persistent music icon that takes you to one of the annoyances on this vehicle you have to go up here and go to this slider to get system volume first of all it's not very accurate it's always laggy behind me same thing goes for tuning there's no knob that tuned to do either kilohertz megahertz or satellite radio stations you're gonna miss that and I wish they had a back button so often I want a physical back button not one on the screen that tends to be in different places at different times now in terms of techno she controls for the drivetrain you've got a Prius style shifter it's an electronic selector it doesn't move anything up here to reverse is gonna get you into your rear camera which is standard on the rav4 electric neutral Drive pretty simple and then over here to be gets you additional regenerative braking or a drag braking for going down hills or long great pretty handy here's your sport button this actually increases the amount of torque though not amount of horsepower available from the powertrain we're gonna talk about that in a minute when we get underneath the hood steering of course is all electric there's no engine to drive hydraulics and we'll see how that feels and we're out on the road no paddle shifters because there's no transmission this is a single speed in the tesla style a reduction gearbox but there are no gears synthetic or otherwise now about half of Tesla's secret sauce is here under the hood the motorist associated electronics let's talk about the power is in this car it's a very interesting story 154 horsepower you'd say that is not much for a big crossover but the torque is what it's all about this guy will have either 218 or 273 foot-pounds those are nice numbers why two numbers sport mode number that button if you're in normal mode this guy has less torque and a lower top speed 85 if you're in sport mode the higher torque number and a higher top speed 100 miles an hour zero to 60 on this guy is either 8.6 seconds or 7 seconds flat again sport mode makes the big difference and of course you're gonna peel off a lot of bit of range if you're LED footing it now in terms of range at mpge the mpge is relatively soft in this vehicle it's a big 176 miles per gallon equivalent range is middled at 103 though Toyota says you may get as high as 113 if you're driving in now just as that power plants got a multi-tiered story so does the charging side of the vehicle because you've got a couple of different charging modes first of all there's a normal mode that gets you a little lesser range about 92 miles on a charge they say but it will prolong the life of the battery or there's an extended range mode that's gonna tax the battery a little more and that will get you 113 miles of range hence the EPA Middle's it at 103 like I mentioned now let's talk about charge times if you've got the top charger a 240 volt 40 amp charger you can do this guy up in four to five hours from pretty much dead flat again that standard or extended mode is the difference in time if you've got a 240 16 amp kind of the wimpiest of 240 circuits you're looking at 12 or 15 hours now here's the kicker if you're on a 110 or 120 outlet 44 to 52 hours to do a full charge I mean you'll forget you own this thing in that much time so absolutely it must be hooked up to a high current charger that's gonna run you about 1600 bucks to have the Toyota approved one installed at your place okay put her into drive and immediately you hear that noise electric cars have to make up to what is it 22 miles an hour very space-age on this one but more importantly what do you feel and that's where of course electric torque just never fails and this is a big boy at over 4,000 pounds but it still moves effortlessly because of all that torque I mean I'm in normal mode now and if I trounce it hello yeah we got everything we need now that's normal mode if I put it in sport it's it's crazy fun you heard that this car is just all torque you've got some body roll because this doesn't have any kind of an active suspension so you know it still comes to tip over a bit but again there's more weight down low to even fight that okay a rav4 electric is fifty thousand six or so V's are always pretty stout tee and knockoff tax credits currently that's ten thousand total federal and California the only place this guy is sold so we're down to about forty thousand or so and there really aren't any options to to go CNET style whether or not that price makes sense for you is going to come down to a number of things including whether you think the relatively limited range of a hundred or so and yet the broad utility of a crossover are pulling it cross purposes that may or may not be the case depending on how you intend to use the vehicle but it could be a crux issue