Rob Greenlee drives a 2007 Camry Hybrid in electric-only mode, showcasing its silent operation and features like a garage-door opener and a Java app that streams podcasts over Wi-Fi to the car's stereo. The hybrid delivers roughly 200 hp without sacrificing comfort or space, even for his 6'8.5" frame.
Chapters
Hi, this is Rob Greenlee. Hey, I'm in my Toyota, 2007 Toyota hybrid, and I'm backing out of my driveway right now, but I thought I would kind of give you an experience of driving the car in the electric mode that it has. It's very cool. Let me close my garage door. You can kind of see that go down. It's got a built-in kind of control for the garage door feature, but I'm sitting here with the vehicle and it's completely turned off. You can see that there's there's no RPMs, there's nothing going on with the engine at all, and then I can start driving forward and it actually just drives. But let me shut up and you can hear the silence. So I would say that it's not a high-performance vehicle when it comes to the electrical part of it. But it's pretty cool to be able to drive a car and have it be silent. The other really cool thing is the tech that's in the car with the stereo system. It's got an aux-in jack that that allows me to play content on my phone. Let me— I gotta put my seatbelt on. So hang on here. And I've got a software client loaded on my Nokia N73 phone that plays streaming audio right off of the wireless network. So you can see I've pulled up to an intersection and about to pull out, the engine completely turns off. There's no— the engine's not running at all, and it's pretty, pretty straightforward for me to just pull out. Now, now the engine did fire up right there, but we're just driving down the road with totally limited use of the gas engine right now, so you can see how it just drives down the road. I think that, you know, we're gonna see more and more of the hybrid technologies come into cars. I know, I think I heard just a day or so ago that there was gonna be a, I think, a Honda Civic hybrid that was going to be priced the exact same price as a regular Civic with hybrid technology, which will hopefully improve the gas mileage on these vehicles. But you can see it's got a very nice ride, it's very smooth, there's a lot of amenities. I mean, you're not compromising anything to be driving around one of these hybrids as far as, you know, the car itself and how comfortable it is. The actual performance of the vehicle is about 200 horsepower if you combine the electrical portion of the vehicle with the gas-powered, which is pretty significant horsepower. I mean, if you need to get up and go, this car moves. So let me show you the back and how it looks on the inside. I'm a pretty tall guy and I fit very well in here. I'm about 6 foot 8 and a half, and I have, you can see, I have plenty of knee room in here with the car itself. But what I really liked about the car was its Bluetooth capability, which is another way you can have your phone plug into the stereo system. You can have hands-free calling built into the vehicle itself, which I know isn't necessarily an entirely new functionality in a Camry or any other, you know, higher-end vehicles. But it is a nice feature to have. I just wish that the phone was able to play music content through like stereo Bluetooth into the stereo system without having to have the wires plugged in like I have now with my phone. But, you know, it works very well. And let me— I need to drive forward. Cause I've got a green light. But let me play my phone here and you can hear what MobileCast sounds like, which is a software application, a little Java application that's available for mobile phones that can play podcasts, which is basically streaming, you know, like podcasts from like BBC, National Public Radio, from a variety of sources. And we also have a lot of music channels in here too. So let me play one of our music channels. You can see it in here, or hear it actually. So it's totally on-demand streaming media that I'm now playing into my car, which is really cool to be able to get access to about 10,000 pieces of content right on my phone in the car while I'm driving down the road. None of this stuff is stored locally, so it's very, very cool. You can see I'm driving in traffic, but hey, I appreciate you listening to my little spiel about the Toyota Camry Hybrid 2007. Take care, bye-bye.
