Another thing I did on Canada Day weekend was install a new button in my car.

Short story: When Toyota originally sold the Prius in Japan, it came with an "EV Button" which, when pressed, instructed the car to run in "electric only" mode for as long as possible. This mode is useful if you are shuffling cars in the driveway, or waiting in line to get out of a parking garage, or slowly driving around a park or something. In those cases, there is no point in turning on the gas engine.

For some reason, when Toyota brought the Prius over to North America, they decided to remove the EV Button. Maybe it was to avoid confusing us, but whatever the reason, it meant that there was a button missing in my Prius.

So, last month I finally got around to ordering a factory EV button from Japan, through a company in the US. Installing the button took about three hours, most of which was spent trying to get a silly terminal inserted into a plug for the computer.

Anyway, I could write thousands of words about installing this thing, but the short version is that I successfully installed it, and it works! It even lights up depending on how the dimmer switch is set.

When researching the button, I noticed that a few people on the internet had tried to take a photo of the button lit up at night, but the photos were always blurry and really bad looking, so I decided to try my hand at taking a night time photo. I was pretty tired today after our company golf tournament, so I actually didn't spend much time trying to frame the perfect shot. Instead, I just handheld the camera, took a few photos, and used Photoshop to make it look better. What a cheater, eh?

Oh well. This picture also marks the beginning of our trip out west, so unfortunately there probably won't be any updates to my Picture Of The Week until we get back... but then hopefully I will have several good pictures to share with everyone.

Technical details: This is a composite of two photos shot with my Rebel XT + 50mm 1.8 Mark II, at ISO 1600, f/1.8, for 1/50th of a second. The first shot was taken with flash set to -2 flash exposure compensation, and the second shot was taken without flash to get the green glow of the button. The second shot was digitally pushed 1.5 stops, combined with the first shot in Photoshop, and then an artificial lens flare was added in Photoshop to give it a little something extra. :)

Comments

That's cool!