Occam's Razor

So in case you were wondering, in late March I bought a Toyota Prius Prime. It was one of three models I had narrowed down as a viable choice. It was a pragmatic choice. I wanted a car that did not exist yet, which had to be fully electric but which I could conveniently recharge in the time it takes to fill a tank with gas. So it was either make a pragmatic choice or keep the 2005 Honda Civic Hybrid going for a few more years hoping the market would mature. My Honda Civic went to my daughter in Virginia. She is carless no more.

When you go nearly fifteen years between buying cars, you tend to be more than a bit wowed by the changes in car technology. I bought a 2018 Prius Prime Advanced because there were dealer incentives to unload them and I could get a tax credit for it. With the tax credit, the net cost will be around $23,000.

I both love and loathe my new Prius Prime. I don’t like its style. The Prius shape is created to be super aerodynamic but its profile is also super unsexy. The Prius has become the Volkswagen Beetle of the 21^st century: ugly but super useful. It is also everywhere because a lot of people like me have figured it out that while it’s not a SUV, it’s an extremely reliable and exceptionally fuel efficient car. It seats four, not five because the hybrid battery needed to be placed somewhere so they put it between the two back seats. The back of the car is actually a hatchback, but there is so much mechanical stuff inside that they had to compromise on trunk space. With the rear seats down you can haul some stuff. But it’s not really a pragmatic family car. Even with just my wife and me, when we take it on vacations we’ll have to pack a bit light.

My Prius also loves to nag me. It’s hardly alone. Most new cars do the same thing. Nonetheless, I’ve started to call it Nanny, because it’s a nanny car. It’s just trying to keep me safe. It would be hard to kill myself in this car because it wouldn’t let me. It’s constantly chirping and beeping to warn me of this and that. If you even just switch lanes without signaling, it will start chirping.

But then again, it’s an amazing car. It would get 50mpg if it were in hybrid mode, but it’s rarely in hybrid mode. 80% of the miles driven so far have been in purely electric mode. This is because most of my driving is local, and it has a purely electric range of about 30 miles or so. Last time I checked I was getting 189 mpg. Three months later, I still have about half a tank of gas. It does have a carbon footprint, but only a tiny one. Its electricity comes largely from our house’s solar panels. If we need anything extra from the grid, we pay for clean wind power. When the engine does turn on, the synergy drive tries to use the hybrid’s battery when possible and recharges it when brakes are applied or going downhill.

With more than fifteen years to perfect the Prius, Toyota has refined a totally practical car if you can live with its few deficiencies. The car feels entirely solid. There is no play in the steering wheel yet it turns smartly and easily. When in EV (electric vehicle) mode, it’s amazingly zippy because it’s being accelerated by an electric motor. In EV mode I can pass pretty much anything on the road without the car hardly trying, and silently because there is no engine running.

Even when the engine comes on though, it’s amazingly quiet. Only when accelerating with the engine on does it make much in the way of noise. The navigation system always tells me where I am going. While it doesn’t work with Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, its navigation system is functional if a bit baffling. The user interface needs a good reengineering.

What I miss about my old Honda Civic is its simplicity. I miss putting a key in the ignition. Also, my Prius can at times be a bit baffling to drive. With only a thick set of user manuals, learning comes slowly. The cruise control uses a separate lever in an odd location. But it’s an adaptive cruise control, which I love, love, love! Figuring out how to adopt it so I had a tighter following distance though was not intuitive. The heads up display on the Advanced model that I have is very convenient.

Some things you don’t have to think much about, like automatic emergency breaking and blind spot detection. It just happens. Doubtless in time it will become old hat, but right now I still struggle with basic things. It is nice to have built in Bluetooth so I can listen to podcasts when I cruise.

Being a plugin, it wants to be plugged in, so getting out of the garage is now a longer process because it has to be unplugged and the cords stowed away. Ditto with arriving home. But I have none of the range anxiety I had driving the Chevy Bolt, which I otherwise really liked and would have bought. I just couldn’t live with stopping for an hour or more to recharge every 250 miles or so when traveling long distances. Pragmatism ruled the day.

And that’s what you get with the Prius Prime: an excellently engineered vehicle that’s super efficient and super reliable and will basically run forever at minimal cost. I really don’t think there is a better value on the market. It was a logical choice and it’s a choice I get happier with over time. I have never felt so safe or have been more impressed with a car, despite its shortcomings. Having owned many Toyotas over the years, I know I can count on Toyota. For the deeply pragmatic type like me that wants great value, efficiency and minimal environment impact, it’s an exceptional value.