Toyota Prius - long-term review

Five months and over 5,000 miles later, I’m coming to the following conclusion on the fifth-gen Toyota Prius.

This is undoubtedly the best-looking, best-made, best-to-drive Prius of the lot. I never tire of the ‘is that a Prius?!' shock from mates when they cadge a lift and can’t believe something so brave, sleek and sharp is the descendant of all those frumpy minicabs.

That low centre of gravity and relatively modest kerbweight for a modern hybrid means it can be hustled through roundabouts and sliproads as fast as its eco-tyres will allow. And every time I’m tasked with testing a screen-festooned new Mercedes, Tesla or Volkswagen, it’s genuinely refreshing to climb back into the Prius with its umpteen buttons and volume knob.

But I can’t escape the quandary that a Prius, above all, should be Toyota’s tech leader. A spearhead for next-gen thinking. This one is merely a normcore plug-in hybrid wrapped up in a cool shell. For less money, you can buy PHEVs with more e-range, and more boot space. You can buy very grown-up EVs. And you can buy lots of Toyota hatchbacks and crossovers which are also hybrids with buttons inside. So why does the Prius even exist?

I put this awkward question to Kohei Yanai, deputy chief engineer of the current Prius. Here’s what he had to say in response.

“For the first gen, second gen, third gen, and fourth gen Prius, [we were] forecasting the [future of] eco-friendly vehicles. But for this fifth gen, we are repositioning the hybrid vehicle. We’ve tried to make it more of an emotional vehicle, with a cool design and good driving performance. Of course, based on the history, customers expect fuel economy, but still even though we change [the car] we still keep the pure economy.”

Fine – I’ve been averaging economy in the high fifties to the gallon for five months and I’m a harsh use case for a PHEV, with three quarters of my annual mileage on motorways, which saps battery and doesn’t allow any re-gen. When I’m staying closer to home the engine goes days without ever turning on.

But still, surely Toyota could’ve just got that performance from the smart-looking Corolla by adding a PHEV system. Why invest in the Prius?

Yanai-san explains that at first, the mk5 Prius was going to head in an even more radical direction – to cater totally to the taxi industry. “At the time we proposed an idea to make the fifth gen Prius a taxi-dedicated vehicle for we - Toyota - thought we [could] contribute to the environment by increased number of [hybrid taxi] vehicles."

Yanai-san says the idea got as far as Toyota CEO approval before a radical design proposal was shown and the company decided to go in a different direction, choosing “an emotional Prius not a commoditised taxi. The car must still contribute to our overall direction towards carbon neutrality, we wanted to make a Prius the customer can love – not one you only choose for rational reasons".

Honourable sentiments. And it fits with the direction Toyota has gone on in the past decade, from dishwasher-central to outlying bastion of fun cars with creations like the GR Yaris, GR86, and promising future projects like the GR GT and solid state-EV LFA. From Yaris to Land Cruiser, there are now multiple Toyotas we readily recommend not simply because they’re reliable white goods.

But I’m still not sure that’s enough for the Prius. In the hotly fought middle ground of the mainstream, cars have to work so hard to tick all the boxes on price and running costs, that design joire d’vivre tends to be a latter consideration on the buying checklist.

Fuel is expensive. So is all energy right now. What would you buy: the hybrid that saves your family the most money, or the less cost-effective hybrid that saves a few quid but tries to look suave doing it?

I’d love to think it’s the latter, but judging by the amount of Jaecoos, Omodas and Toyota’s own Corollas I see on my daily trudges around the UK motorway network, I’m not sure the maths for a style-over-substance Prius stacks up.