Enduring love for uncool car
You can’t help but leap to the defence of the Toyota Prius when it gets unfairly attacked so often, writes David Linklater.
For a brief time, at the dawn of petrol-electric hybrid technology, the Toyota Prius was highly desirable. The vehicle of choice for A-list celebrities, no less.
That aura very quickly evaporated and I think it’s fair to say that the Prius is one of the most uncool cars on the planet. Certainly to us Kiwis: try to picture one and you’ll probably conjure up an image of a battered early-2000s model with a red sticker on the rear door. Airport please, driver.
The Prius is hated by many self-proclaimed car enthusiasts because it puts fuel-efficiency first and advertises its eco-credentials by looking wilfully strange. It’s an in-your-face visual statement to the rest of the world that you care about saving fuel way more than actually enjoying the drive.
With the rise of the pure electric vehicle, the Prius is also now hated by many EV fundamentalists, because it dares to be an eco-icon but is still only available with petrol-assisted hybrid technology. It’s a deceitful ‘‘planet killer’’, as I heard it described by one EVangelist recently.
My secret shame is that I love the Toyota Prius. Always have.
I’ll admit there’s a bit of an underdog mentality to my affection for the Toyota. It gets picked on so often, you can’t help but leap to its defence. Well, I can’t.
But there’s a lot more to it than that. Back in the early days I was fascinated with the technology: the seamless switch from electric
to petrol power, the combination of both, the regenerative system feeding power into the battery under braking. All presented in surprise-and-delight graphics on the dashboard. It gave the driver an insight into a car’s technological workings (in realtime) more than any other mainstream model.
This stuff is not such a novelty today and it could be argued that Toyota has not taken the technology greatly forward. Mainstream Prius models still work to the same principles as those of 20 years ago and most versions still use nickel-metal hydride batteries.
But there’s been a quiet evolution over time and the fourth-generation version is staggeringly economical: 3.4 litres per 100km. It’s also much better to drive briskly, thanks to a new platform called the Toyota New Global Architecture (TNGA). If you want to drive a Prius briskly.
To those EVangelists I say: don’t forget that Prius technology is used right across the Toyota range and has powered more than
10 million cars globally so far. This car has done a whole lot more to save the planet over the last two decades than pure-electric cars. It introduced the idea of a super-ecocar into mainstream motoring.
I might also clear my throat and point out that Prius was actually one of the first plug-in hybrid models in the world – in third-generation PHV form in
2012. It was the world’s best-selling plug-in car until 2015, when newer models like the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV and Tesla Model S started to take off.
The Prius PHV was never sold new in New Zealand, but it’s available as a used import, including Toyota NZ’s Signature Class programme.
I ran one of these for eight months and it became a valued member of our household. The
4.4kWh lithium-ion battery only gave around 25km pure-electric range, but during its time with us it still ran on pure-electric power around 30 per cent of the time. It would have been much more, but I did lots of longer trips in the car – which is one of the big advantages of combining plug-in power with a hybrid system. The car had a range of well over 1000km.
Perhaps because of my PHV history, I’m especially keen on the latest Prime, which is the first Prius plug-in model to be sold new in NZ.
It’s not only the cheapest plugin hybrid you can buy at $48,490, it’s arguably the one with the best real-world range: the battery is twice as big as the old PHV and gives a claimed 63km pure-electric running. That’s optimistic unless you pull out all the eco-stops or run exclusively in heavy traffic, but it’s easily capable of 40-50km (even if you throw in some motorway running) on the basis of my road-test experience.
So while that used PHV struggled to justify the price-premium over a standard car because it still spent quite a lot of time using petrol, the new Prime would be a brilliant car for me because the vastly superior EV-range would mean I’d be driving on plug-in power most of the time. In the PHV, I couldn’t quite commute to work and back without running out of battery charge; during my week in the Prime, I was able do at least two return trips between at-home charges.
And yes, I like the fact the Prius is still so nerdy and I like the fact that it looks weird and I like the fact that the dashboard is full of confusing graphs from a 1990s scifi movie.
I especially like the fact that the Prius Prime annoys Nissan Leaf owners so much.
So there you go: I love the Toyota Prius even more now, because it’s evolved from eco-uglyduckling to an excellent plug-in option. Perhaps I’ve said too much.