Toyota Prius - long-term review

What does the future hold for the Prius? Over the last half-a-year, that’s puzzled me, as Toyota claims this car’s job is to make hybrids affordable, then sells several much cheaper hybrids.

So, the future of the original hybrid populariser is murky. ‘My’ Prius’s future? A little clearer. Where does it go after life at Top Gear? To the Moon. According to second-hand car market data, a Toyota Prius is statistically harder to kill than a cockroach. Or Keith Richards.

A US study last year found the average Toyota Prius lasted 12.5 years, and reached 172,109 miles in its life, making it the longest-lived hybrid car in the entire United States. It found a third of Priuses make it past 200,000 miles.

And it’s not just a Stateside phenomenon. Back in the mid 2010s an Austrian taxi driver who ran his mk2 Prius past one million kilometres (621,000 miles) swore not only had it never broken down, but it was still on its original hybrid battery.

You can make many jibes at the Prius, for previously looking dorky and now being too expensive in a market flooded with cheap Chinese identi-hybrids. But the cold hard fact is: if you want unimpeachable reliability and longevity from a petrol-electric car, it’s bombproof. As I’ve been discovering, by driving a Prius with a mere 300,000 miles on the clock.

Y’see, while I drive my Top Gear long-term test cars more than the typical UK motorist (the average British driver’s annual mileage was 7,200 miles per year in 2025 – I’ve done 6,800 miles in six months) Toyota would have to lend me one for 19 years for me to report back what it’s like to drive one the distance from Earth to the Moon. Much easier to borrow one that’s already well into the return journey.

This 64-plate mk2 Prius used to belong – inevitably – to a minicabber. Looks suspiciously fresh, doesn’t it? That’s because after it’d had all the vomit firehosed out of the back seats, it was bought by eBay as a sort of worst-case-scenario case study in recommissioning a clapped-out old banger using internet auction parts.

Except…. this is a Prius. So instead of having to replace tired engine, transmission and even suspension gubbins, the £3,790 taxi only needed new tyres, fresh brakes, and smattering of interior trim. Plus a new steering wheel, after the original had been donated to medical science. Cost of restoration? £1,865.

After the well run-in Toyota had been given a thorough going over by female-led London garage Spanners With Manners, the folks at eBay leant it to me for a morning. Overriding the urge to slump into the back seats and fall asleep, I took it for a drive and was thoroughly whelmed.

Of course it’s slow. The CVT moos. The steering’s lifeless blah-blah. But the seat stuffing hadn’t sagged to the width of a playing card. Every single knob and button still worked, and even the writing on the controls hadn’t worn off. Its only foible seemed to be creaking rear suspension, later diagnosed as a loose piece of trim in the spare wheel well. Frankly, it felt good for another 300,000 miles at fifty miles per gallon.

There’s a serious point to all this. As of right now, the average age of cars on British roads has never been older – nine years and 10 months. As costs rise and wages stagnate (and brand new models are sullied with infuriating tech) we’re pushing veteran cars to last longer. Of the 42.5 million road vehicles in the UK, more than six million currently have over at least 100,000 miles on the clock, and 407,000 are past 200,000 miles.

So as I say cheerio to GX75 WRO, I’m left in a quandary. Do I recommend this Prius? Mathematically, I don’t think it stacks up – there are more tax-, fuel- and space-efficient cars on sale that ask less money. A Golf eHybrid is a better all-rounder right now than the household-name hybrid. But in half a million miles’ time? The car in front is (probably) a Toyota.