A Prius as you know and maybe love, but one you can charge up at your nearest plug point.
Toyota has announced a new version of their fourth-generation Prius, which they’ve chosen to name, rather obtusely, the Prius Prime, at the 2016 New York Auto Show. In a nutshell, it can be pretty much summarised as a plug-in hybrid version of everyone’s favorite eco Toyota.
They’ve teased the Prius Prime on the ramp up to the auto show, and we were wondering what could follow Toyota’s claim to have a “mechanical marvel” for imminent unveil.
To details what’s new will not take a long list or much effort to pack it down to a sentences rather than paragraphs. There is an 8.8kWh battery pack that would take around that can be charged from my household socket, and Toyota say the Prius Prime has the best equivalent effiiency figure in the industry of 120MPG(e) or roughly 1.96-litres/100km.
That battery also allows for the car to operate for more prolonged periods solely on electric power, leaving virtually no need to invoke the 1.8-litre petrol engine on shorter commutes. Toyota claims 35km of electric range and a top zero emissions speed of 135km/h, although we suspect both figures are mutually exclusive.
Apart from that major point of differentiation, the Prius Prime does sport a new tail light design as well as a set of four LED headlights on each side, the former of which we saw during Toyota’s NY Auto Show teaser.
You can spec your Prius Prime, should you choose, with an 11.6-inch touchscreen that takes up most of the car’s centre console vertical space.
The Prius Prime should be available to buyers starting in the later half of 2016, but Toyota is keeping tight-lipped about pricing, and perahps rightly so since that might just be the biggest swing factor between it and the competition, to which the Prius Prime does fall short of in some areas such as out-and-out electric range. Toyota also doesn’t want to harm sales to its regular non-Prime Priuses.
