Prius PHV: It's Wizardry on Wheels!

[Ten Ninety]

So, I’ve had my Prius PHV for two weeks, and thought I’d share a few of my first impressions, good and bad.

I wanted one in Pearl White with the light grey interior, registered in March 2017 for the free tax. I ended up with one in Hypersonic Red with a black interior, registered in June 2017. I’m not very good at buying cars. However, despite having failed to meet all three criteria, I’m still happy with my purchase. And to save you wading through what follows, I can summarise my thoughts very nicely: I like this car a lot.

💕 That Tailgate!

Can anyone truly say they’ve bought a car because of its boot lid? I think I can now. It’s nothing short of an engineering marvel with its double-bubble glass, uber-cool LED light strip and honest-to-god legit carbon fibre that’s subtly visible through the window. Okay, so that light strip is disappointingly fake (only the central brake light illuminates) and yes, there’s the small matter of not having a rear wiper (although interestingly the aero actually keeps the screen completely clear as long as you’re moving) but still… it is a masterpiece of geeky design. I absolutely love it.

💕 Squint, and it looks a bit like an Alfa SZ.

Remaining on the subject of looks, I was trying to work out why I find the PHV more appealing to the eye than the standard Gen4, and realised that it might have something to do with looking a tiny bit like an Alfa SZ. Especially in red.

I was an impressionable teenager when the SZ appeared – in fact, it arrived the same year I passed my driving test – and I’ve always harboured a liking for them. I reckon there’s more than a little of the SZ design language in the Prius PHV. They’re both unconventionally attractive. Or, perhaps, conventionally ugly. Definitely ungainly from some angles, and more than a little quirky in the detailing. And to my eyes, they share quite a few of those details: the square headlights; the steeply-raked waistline with an excess of body over the rear wheel; the black roofline and glasshouse; the full-width light strip at the rear… and the SZ had a pretty decent drag coefficient for its day as well.

💕 It’s a Smooth Operator

We all know the hybrid drivetrain is supremely relaxing when driven as intended. The PHV adds another dimension – as I’m sure the standard Gen 4 also does on 15” wheels – which is a proper cosseting ride. There’s a level of bump absorption that people seem to have forgotten is actually possible in these days of huge wheels and tiny sidewalls. Yet it doesn’t flop around corners like a dying halibut either; it feels remarkably well-balanced and tied down. Incredibly, it actually delivers a more comfortable ride than my Lexus GS Premier, probably thanks to the latter’s wholly unnecessary 18” wheels. It’s a bit ridiculous that this eco-car should be so much smoother than a ‘luxury exec’ saloon, but it is. No more thumping horribly over horizontal seams on the A14; no more getting jiggled uncomfortably on badly-maintained B-roads and what were once haemorrhoid-troubling speed humps are now dispatched with nary a rectal twinge.

💕 Zero-Emission Commuting? Nearly!

Having not owned a plug-in vehicle before, I was looking forward to the experience of electric-only running. My journey to work is 32 miles, give or take. It’s an easy route to drive economically and very well-suited to hybrids. I figured that whilst the official EV range of 39 miles would be hopelessly optimistic, I might manage 32 on days when it’s not cold or wet. And manage it, I have.

The full-charge range has been a bit random so far, but I guess it’s getting used to my driving style.

• Day One, a full charge got me a disappointing 31 miles on the indicator. But, 32 miles later, I was arriving at work with 0.1 mile still showing.
• Day Two, I kicked off with 33 miles, but made it with nothing to spare.
• Day Three, I kicked off with 35 miles but the roads were properly wet and I fell short by a couple of miles.
• Day Four, I started with 35 miles again, but it was chillier and I fell short by a mile.
• Day Five, I started with 36 miles then turned the AC off completely and saw 39 miles estimated. I left the heating off and arrived at work with 3 miles still left, and rather cold feet. I won’t be doing that on a regular basis, but it was an interesting experiment.

A week further on, and the indicated range is inching above 40 miles, but in reality I’m still getting similar actual range. Overall, I’m happy with that. I knew I’d be unlikely to get all the way to work outside of summer time, and it’s clear that wet roads and cold temperatures have the same big impact on economy as in any other car. In the depths of winter, I’ll probably be lucky to make it half way.

However, that’s not the whole story. Because, of course, there’s the journey back each day, where - until I can manage to wangle a charging point at work - the car is lugging a very big, very flat EV Battery all the way home. I was hoping to see an indicated 70-75mpg for these journeys, as that’s what I used to get in my Gen3. The new setup is obviously more efficient than the Gen3, but I figured the extra dead weight would pull it back down.

I figured wrong.

• Day 1, that 0.1 mile of charge disappeared pulling out of the work car park, meaning the whole journey was done in HV mode. I was gobsmacked to arrive home with 92mpg showing on the meter, although I’d been slowed down for a portion of the journey by a tractor so figured this wasn’t representative.
• Day 2, dragging the flat Battery all the way and without the benefit of a slow tractor, netted me 85mpg.
• Day 3, with the roads having dried out since the morning, I was up to 87mpg
• Day 4, it was still a bit colder and I managed 83mpg
• Day 5, it was warmer and I had a bit of EV range to get me going, so I hit 94mpg.

Since then, I’ve never been below 80mpg even when starting with absolutely zero EV range and I’ve been back over 90 a few times with a best run home of 97mpg. That is seriously impressive to me, and indicates just how brilliant the standard non-PHV Gen4 hybrid setup really must be.

A quick flick through the info screens soon reveals the reason for such petrol parsimony. I’m hitting well over 50% - often over 60% - of engine-off running on the journey home. The slice of the Battery that works like a standard hybrid is far stronger than any other hybrid I’ve driven, not least for its ability to let me cruise for extended periods at 50mph with the engine off. And when the engine does run, the fiendishly clever algorithm that determines power routing manages to harvest charge by using ‘excess’ petrol power even when not on re-gen. Sometimes it manages to grab enough to bring the EV range meter back into play, allowing me to switch to full EV mode for short distances despite starting with ‘nothing in the tank’. I’ve always guesstimated around 30% of engine-off running on that route in my other hybrids, so to be hitting double that is a pretty amazing achievement for this car. 

🙉 Infernal Indicator Clicks

Of course, no car is perfect and the PHV has its fair share of irritations. Not least, the appalling noise that issues forth every time the indicator stalk is used.

Why, Toyota, why? If the C-HR – and, by all accounts, the standard Gen4 – can have an inoffensively-soft click then what on earth possessed you to equip the PHV with a squeaky, tinny clicker that actually manages to approximate a fingernail/blackboard interface?

I’ve got a Carista dongle on the way, so I’ll see if lowering the volume makes it more tolerable, and failing that I’ll just silence it completely. For the time being, I’m tempted to go full-Audi and just not signal at all. It really is that bad.

🤬 Un-Turn-Offable Auto Headlights

I realise I’m preaching to the converted here (well, @PeteB anyway) but seriously, how can it possibly be acceptable to have removed the ‘Off’ switch for the headlights when the Auto setting is so goddamn dangerous? The first thing I did was set the sensitivity to its lowest, yet they still go on at the slightest hint of shadow. I actually clocked up over twenty unnecessary activations the other day before I gave up and stopped counting. As twilight fell, I had to pull right back from the van in front, as I could see him looking in the mirror wondering what my game was.

Last Friday, on a narrow lane, the car in front stopped in a shadowy dip to wait for some fighting pigeons to get out of the way. I wasn’t in a hurry, and completely understood why he had stopped. Nobody wants a fat wood pigeon in their grille and when the birds are scrapping they often just won’t move for you. However, the dim light triggered my stupid auto lights, so the chap got upset and gestured back angrily because he thought I was being impatient. Fortunately, he wasn’t a violent psycho, but I struggled to find the right sign language for ‘sorry, it’s not me, it’s the car’.

And then, of course, there was my daily roundabout-with-a-flyover, where the inevitable happened: the lights came on under the flyover and the person waiting at the entrance thought I was flashing them to pull out. I was already braking at this point, because I knew full well what was going to happen, but it was still an unnecessary danger.

Seriously, auto headlights are an absolute  liability. To make them impossible to disable is madness. I don’t want to run sidelights all the time, because that dims the DRLs, which are a useful safety feature in the land of partially-sighted pensioners where I live. And I’d really rather not run on dipped headlights all the time either, as that’s just wasting energy when it’s not dark. I wonder if Carista can access an even-less-sensitive setting than the paltry -2 the car presently allows?

😢 Economy-Class Seating

Okay, so I am coming from 18-way semi-aniline heated/ventilated luxury, and anything is going to be a bit of a comedown from that but still… it really hurts that the Prius Prime in the US gets proper electrical adjustability whilst here I am having to crank myself up and down and back and forth manually like a prole. A bit more padding wouldn’t go amiss, either.

💩 Archaic Infotainment

This goes without saying, really. I’m not disappointed with it because I knew it was going to be bad, but it’s such a simple thing to get right that it’s depressing to see Toyota (along with so many other manufacturers to be fair) fail so hard. I mean, Mirrorlink? Really? That’s all you’re giving me in a car released in 2017? And just to rub it in that I can’t use my phone’s screen, you’re making me use an interface that looks like something from the days of Windows 7? You. Can. Do. Better.

The sat nav actually gave me some hope, at first. Unlike my GS with its offensively-basic 1990s-style map display, the Toyota map at least looks vaguely modern. It can connect to the internet via my phone, to get those all-important live traffic updates. And it’s evidently been updated fairly recently, as all the shoddy new-build estates that are popping up like fungus on my route to work seem to be accounted for. Could this finally be an in-car nav system that’s worth using?

Of course, not.

Because then, you actually try to use the damn thing and it all falls apart. Primarily, because some cheapskate bean-counter in Aichi specced a wholly-inadequate CPU to power the whole thing. It’s impossibly slow to route, laggy to use and despite that internet connection it has so far managed to provide 100% inaccurate traffic info. All reported delays have failed to materialise, it insisted that a road was completely shut last week when it clearly wasn’t and it’s failed to give any warning of the delays which did actually occur.

Still, in brighter news, the wireless charging mat nearly works, which means I don’t have to pull the surprisingly un-rattly trim apart to route a charging cable to a phone holder. That means I can run TomTom on my phone sitting on the mat, and occasionally glance down for proper accurate traffic info. I say nearly works, because it can’t supply enough charge to stop the battery from slowly draining when running TomTom, but to be fair that’s more to do with TomTom being a CPU hog than any real fault with Toyota.

And, whilst the interface for music playing is predictably clunky, when it’s cranked up the JBL setup genuinely sounds terrific. I have tinnitus and hearing loss so I’m hardly operating at audiophile level, but I couldn’t honestly say the fancy Mark Levinson system in my GS sounds any better.

😁 Conclusion

All in all, I am seriously impressed with this car. However, I can see why Toyota haven’t sold many.

It’s a very niche market: an odd-looking four-seater with no spare wheel, a tiny boot and an unattractive price. Add in the general public’s completely irrational but depressingly common fear of any car that plugs in to a power socket, and you can see why used PHVs lose value far more rapidly than the standard hybrid. I am under no illusions: the PHV makes no financial sense. The money I’ll save in fuel will be far less than the extra I’ll lose in depreciation compared to the standard Gen4. I didn’t even manage to bag a free-tax one either.

However, I’m finding it hard to care about that. For me there is a perverse joy to be gained in perambulating around the countryside whilst using no fuel, that outweighs such pecuniary concerns. I’ve also already enjoyed getting into a pre-heated car in the morning, and that joy will only grow in the winter months. The adaptive headlights – once it’s dark and they’ve stopped flapping around switching on and off – are actually incredibly effective, and even better than the steerable HIDs of the Lexus.

Besides, to be honest, even if it didn’t have any of those extras, I’d still have got one over the standard Gen4. Because I’m vainly juvenile at heart, and I’m easily seduced by surface beauty.

And any which way you play it, a carbon fibre bootlid is properly f-----g cool.

[Catlover]

Thank you Jay for taking the trouble to write such a comprehensive review - you done well.

Glad you like it, after the trouble you had finding one.

[altocumulus]

We're 8 days into ours and I can understand your excitement. There are a few niggles, it's true to admit.

The HUD - why only MPH and that ECO display (+ road signs when it feels like it) - why not allow more customisation - I've always liked the idea of an MPG readout too.

BSM indicators - you can't see them unless you look in the wing mirror which kind of defeats their object? And if the light level is bright they're almost invisible.

Yes, that aerodynamic back window - jazzy - and the dip in the mid-bar allows you to view more of the tail-gators than in the ordinary Prius - I'm hoping a polish with Rain-X will help keep it clear.

Early days - but I'm already seeing, on HV, a much better MPG than in the Prius.

[Chris Dance]

Interesting write ups Jay and Geoff. Even with the few niggles you seem very pleased with the car. Just a shame it has no spare wheel and not a lot of storage.

I hear Nissan are providing a storage for a spare wheel in some of their models but you have to purchase the spare as an extra. 

I am also very pleased with our Gen 4. I tell folk it is a computer on wheels. 

[PeteB]

37 minutes ago, Chris Dance said:

... I tell folk it is a computer on wheels. 

that's what I was saying about my Gen 1 Prius 16 years ago...  😁

[Ten Ninety]

4 hours ago, altocumulus said:

The HUD - why only MPH and that ECO display (+ road signs when it feels like it) - why not allow more customisation - I've always liked the idea of an MPG readout too.

BSM indicators - you can't see them unless you look in the wing mirror which kind of defeats their object? And if the light level is bright they're almost invisible.

First thing I did was kill off the road sign assist as I hated it taking over the HUD (and being wrong 50% of the time). I do agree that being able to choose a wider range of info to go on the HUD would be useful though. The blue 'recommendation' for throttle position would have been useful.

I actually like the BSM indicators. I've had them in the Lexus for a couple of years and find them useful when entering from a sliproad, as it means I no longer have to do a 'lifesaver' look over my shoulder and risk triggering my problematic neck! I can also set the mirrors to a narrow angle for parking without worrying about leaving a huge blind spot as a result. 

Another niggle I forgot to mention was the one you posted on your other thread - the difficulty of accessing the centre console from the passenger seat. An utterly unfathomable design decision!

[RichSH]

Great review and, having had my PHV for a couple of months now, I agree with just about everything you've written. At the risk of asking a question which may well have been answered elsewhere, what is a Carista dongle and what will you be able to do with it?

Thanks

Richard

[Ten Ninety]

1 hour ago, RichSH said:

Great review and, having had my PHV for a couple of months now, I agree with just about everything you've written. At the risk of asking a question which may well have been answered elsewhere, what is a Carista dongle and what will you be able to do with it?

Thanks

Richard

It's a bluetooth OBD adapter that links to a phone app and allows you to customise the settings listed in the manual that are 'dealer only' options. Which, on the PHV, is most of them!

I got mine off Amazon - it arrived yesterday. I now have marginally less aggravating (quieter) indicator clicks and an automatic six indicator flashes rather than three. I may increase the latter further to reduce the need to ever click the stalk down fully, as that makes a horrible cheap plastic noise every time! I've fiddled with a few other settings but sadly, the headlights can't be made any less sensitive than the setting that's already changeable on the car's screen.

You get a month's free trial of the app which is more than enough to test out whatever settings you want to change. There's a helpful thread below which shows screenshots of all the settings.

 

 

[altocumulus]

On 9/24/2018 at 7:44 PM, Ten Ninety said:

It's a Bluetooth OBD adapter that links to a phone app and allows you to customise the settings listed in the manual that are 'dealer only' options. Which, on the PHV, is most of them!

I got mine off Amazon - it arrived yesterday. I now have marginally less aggravating (quieter) indicator clicks and an automatic six indicator flashes rather than three. I may increase the latter further to reduce the need to ever click the stalk down fully, as that makes a horrible cheap plastic noise every time! I've fiddled with a few other settings but sadly, the headlights can't be made any less sensitive than the setting that's already changeable on the car's screen.

You get a month's free trial of the app which is more than enough to test out whatever settings you want to change. There's a helpful thread below which shows screenshots of all the settings.

 

That's one long list of options! It would be interesting to see how many would benefit me to tweek!

One other item I could mention is the having to manually open / close the boot door, having gotten used to the RAV being automated. Does a motor really add that much weight!?

[Ten Ninety]

On 9/25/2018 at 10:31 AM, altocumulus said:

That's one long list of options! It would be interesting to see how many would benefit me to tweek!

One other item I could mention is the having to manually open / close the boot door, having gotten used to the RAV being automated. Does a motor really add that much weight!?

The indicator change was worth it for me, although it's still not as quiet as I'd like! A lot of the other stuff I didn't really see a need to adjust. I'm not sure it's worth getting one just to fiddle, unless there's a setting you know you want to change.

Regarding the tailgate, if they went to the trouble of building it in carbon fibre and leaving out the wiper and motor, I presume weight saving over the rear was the priority - understandable with all that Battery in the boot!

[PeteB]

The only one I wanted to change that wasn't on the user menus was the continuous beeping when reverse is selected (on top of the parking sensor beep).  Fortunately my dealer made the change for me before the car was delivered (foc), as they did on my previous Gen 3 Prius.

[altocumulus]

11 hours ago, PeteB said:

The only one I wanted to change that wasn't on the user menus was the continuous beeping when reverse is selected (on top of the parking sensor beep).  Fortunately my dealer made the change for me before the car was delivered (foc), as they did on my previous Gen 3 Prius.

It was the reverse and front sensors in visual that made us pick the Excel, rather than the Business Editon. The visual aids to parking - I could just hear the RAV sensors alarming, but in the phev I don't get anything.

11 hours ago, Ten Ninety said:

The indicator change was worth it for me, although it's still not as quiet as I'd like! A lot of the other stuff I didn't really see a need to adjust. I'm not sure it's worth getting one just to fiddle, unless there's a setting you know you want to change.

Regarding the tailgate, if they went to the trouble of building it in carbon fibre and leaving out the wiper and motor, I presume weight saving over the rear was the priority - understandable with all that battery in the boot!

Indeed - I guess weight is at the very maximum - I wonder if that's why it's also a 4-seater and not a five!?

 

[kithmo]

21 hours ago, PeteB said:

The only one I wanted to change that wasn't on the user menus was the continuous beeping when reverse is selected (on top of the parking sensor beep).  Fortunately my dealer made the change for me before the car was delivered (foc), as they did on my previous Gen 3 Prius.

I changed mine to one beep with the Carista app.

[QuantumFireball]

On 9/29/2018 at 7:12 AM, altocumulus said:

Indeed - I guess weight is at the very maximum - I wonder if that's why it's also a 4-seater and not a five!?

 

I've heard something along the lines of limitations with the GVWR on the platform which made them limit the car to 4 seats, rather than there actually not being enough space for the 5th seat.