Toyota Prius - long-term review

How far has the humble hybrid developed in a quarter of a century? To find out, I invented a time machine and went back to the early 2000s. Unfortunately, there was an altercation with a fighty gilet lad and this eccentric scientist who was too old to believably be his mate and to cut a long story short, we’re now living in the bad timeline with the evil presidents and AI overlords. Sorry about that.

Anyway, plan B worked out better: ring up Toyota and ask if they had an original Prius lying around. Amazingly in the secret industrial state lock-up where the UK operation houses its prized LFA supercar, various motorsport legends and even the Hilux truck which Clarkson and May sailed to the North Pole… there it was. A 23-year old X-reg minter, its Caspian Blue paintwork a dead ringer for the ‘Lunar Shadow’ worn by the brand-new Prius I’ve lived with for the last six months.

Cobwebs blown off, I took the Prius-toric for a grand day out. In some ways, it was charming. In others, I wondered how this didn’t kill the hybrid dream stone dead before it started – and take the mighty Toyota mothership with it.

Right off the bat let’s acknowledge Toyota’s crayon department is no longer stumbling around in the dark like it was in the early millennium. The new Prius has the windowline of a Lamborghini and aerodynamically chiselled features. The old Prius saloon is the textbook definition of frumpy.

It frowns at you with an 'I’d like to speak to your supervisor' expression, balanced upon microscopic 13in wheels which I worry I’ll tear clean off in modern British potholes. In fact, the ride turns out to be pillowy. To be fair, the latest version rides extremely well considering it's on the biggest wheels Toyota will bolt to a Prius.

Obviously any car that’s now 23 years old has some advantages over the current stuff. No bongs to silence. No bleeps (from the driver) when the car chastises you for looking out of the window. No worries of laggy infotainment. There’s FM or AM radio (unless you’re going under a bridge, when there’s hissing static) and a choice of tape or CD!

New Prius? You’re sat incredibly low, almost eye-to-eye with the driver of an MX-5. It’s come a long way down – driving the old one is like sitting on a bar stool.

The column shifter feels hopelessly clunky while communication between the piddly brakes and re-generation system seems to be relying on a piece of string between two baked bean cans. I have never driven any car that’s so inconsistent, lurching, and unnerving to stop.

Luckily it never really gets moving in the first place. With 70bhp on tap from the 1.5-litre petrol engine and a mere 40bhp of electrical garnish, the entire mk1 Prius powertrain is considerably less powerful than just the ‘EV’ part of the latest PHEV. 0-62mph takes over 13 seconds and it can’t even crack a hundred. What’s not changed at all is how that power is delivered.

The pedal is pushed. The CVT moos. The pedal is floored. The CVT whines. The pedal is begged for forward propulsion. The CVT rages at your timekeeping for ruining its mpg average, and – talk amongst yourselves – some considerable time later you arrive at thirty miles an hour.

Now, the new Prius is secretly quite quick – it’s half a second faster from 0-62mph than the mk5 Golf GTI that would’ve been going on sale as the mk1 Prius bowed out of production.

But the sense of irritating the elastic CVT – as if it’s got better things to be doing than transmitting your commands to the wheels – is authentically shared in both cars. Toyota has persevered with this loathed transmission because it’s compact, easy to package, tough as old boots and cheaper than chips.

So what about the big one: fuel economy? The gilded likes of DiCaprio, Diaz, Hanks, Goldblum, Portman, Cyrus and Aniston didn’t famously flock to the Prius in the early 2000s because it was sexy or fun to drive or especially safe or opaque to a TMZ flashbulb.

They did it for the perception that it would save the planet and give them a hotline to President Al Gore.

Toyota claimed the car was good for up to 57mpg and 114g/km of CO2. The new Prius skews the numbers massively with its 40-odd miles of electric range. But having spent 6,000 mainly motorway and A-road miles in it, charging diligently but often running the battery flat a third of the way into my journey, I can report a long-term average of 57mpg on motorways, and closer to 70mpg when doing town errands.

That looks unremarkable, but the old timer only returned 45mpg on its big adventure before being cosied back up for another long slumber in Toyota HQ, so we’ve seen progress after all.

The new car is safer, more feature rich, a spaceship to drive in comparison, despite weighing a third of a tonne more. Yet it uses less fuel. And that, ultimately is all the Prius – any Prius – was built to do.

If only I could have the looks, performance, safety, intelligence and economy on the new car, with the absent nannying ‘assists’ of the old-timer.