I was sad when I had to return the Toyota Highlander after driving it around for a week. There were so many amazing features and it drove super smooth. The Toyota Highlander thought of everybody in this design – there is comfort in both the front and back seats.

I was provided with the Hybrid version of the Toyota Highlander to drive around. I live 40 miles from work so every little bit of gas savings is appreciated.

The first thing I did when the Highlander was dropped off was pair my phone and play around with the features on the home screen. The large center screen is amazing, and in “home” mode it is split between Audio and Maps. This gives you the best of both worlds, you can follow along with the navigation and still see what is playing on the radio. I am terrible when it comes to knowing who sings what songs so having it display on the screen (even for over the air) is great.

One of my favorite features was that the radio would pause when use answer the phone. This is GENIUS! Sometimes I am a little sad when somebody calls me when my favorite song is playing, this solves the problem because not only does it start where you left of when the call is over, you can rewind the song to start at the beginning and then fast forward through commercials (or songs you don’t like) to get caught back up.

With the Entune app, use  your phone’s cell signal to link with Pandora, I Heart Radio, Bing and more! This is a great way to utilize how connected our lives are.

The Toyota Highlander offers lots of high tech safety features such as blind spot monitoring, lane departure warnings and adaptive cruise control. If the car detects that you are drifting over the lane marking (without your blinker on) it will beep to alert you. In addition to this being a safety feature, its also a good training tool for us Washington drivers who aren’t the best at using our blinker. Adaptive cruise control allows you to set the cruise control based off of the distance between you and the car in front of you.

The steering wheel itself includes a bunch of features. From it you can control the radio, phone, and there is a ton of information that can be scrolled through on the dashboard. I wish I could have gotten my camera to properly focus on the dashboard to show all the cool things that it displayed.

One thing I loved was that ALL windows feature auto windows. So many cars have this on the drivers window; but it definitely makes sense to have it on all the other windows. Plus Auto-UP is just as handy as Auto-Down!

Just below the video screen there is a small shelf which can be used for charging your cell phone. The USB charging cable can be snaked up through the hole in the shelf. This is a great answer for a space that would otherwise to unused. This space could also be used to hold small items like the key (since it’s a push shart), the passenger’s books, or mints.

I love the large center console that is between the front seats. It is super deep and offers a removable tray. This would be the perfect place to store your purse while driving.

The back seats have some pretty cool features as well, The middle seats are captains chairs (on certain models) to give easier access to the third row. The cup holder and tray folds down to give a larger space between the seats. The seats are also on tracks so they can glide forward or backward depending where you need the space.

These two captain chairs feature heated seats and their own controls for the heating and AC. The windows also feature a window screen that can be pulled up to block to sun from coming in. I wasn’t able to get a photo of it, but definitely a feature that is great for kids to keep the sun out of their eyes while they are in the car seat.

If hauling is what you need to do, all of the back seats fold down (or just some of them) in order to utilize all the space. This Toyota Highlander helped me get to two different craft fairs while I had it and I was definitely impressed with how much I was able to put in with lots of room to spare!

For accessing items from the back, sometimes you just need to grab something from the top. The Toyota Highlander thinks of this by providing a way for just the back window to pop open. A couple times I wanted to throw a couple small things on top of what I was hauling and this was great to just pop open the window and set it on top.

Between High Tech Safety Features, Driver and Passenger comfort, and Panoramic Moonroof there are so many amazing features on this Toyota Highlander that I wasn’t able to capture them all in this post. Make sure to check out all the other features on Toyota’s website.

I absolutely loved this vehicle. They thought of so many details for driver and passenger comfort and safety. What feature would you love the most?

I was provided with a Toyota Highlander to drive around for a week in exchange for my honest opinion. All thoughts are my own.