Put the selector in Drive, release the foot-operated parking brake, press the accelerator and off you go, almost silently.
Battery charge and gentleness of accelerator foot permitting, the Prius will run in electric-only mode at up to 31mph. Then the petrol engine discreetly joins in. Its start-up is near-silent because there’s no conventional starter, and you are in a world where what you do with the throttle and what you hear from the engine are only loosely connected.
That said there’s less of the skyward soaring of high-load revs than in the old Prius and it feels much punchier. The Prius feels perky enough not to get in the way of other traffic, and the continuous rush of refined energy from standstill to cruise is sufficient to prevent you from wishing you were driving something else.
All the while, you have a choice of ghostly green graphics to hold your interest. There’s an energy flow diagram showing, in a side view with rotating wheels, what is charging or being driven by what. Petrol power gets a red energy path, which is almost impossible to see in sunlight. Or you can select bar graphs showing fuel consumption and energy regenerated.
But most of the time it’s best to leave the Prius to its own devices. The brakes are soft underfoot and hard to feather smoothly, but the transition from regenerative braking to using the discs is undetectable at the pedal.
The top-spec Prius T Spirit has 17in wheels as standard instead of the 15in ones fitted to base models.
The result is cars with very different dynamic characters, but the Prius has a remarkably quiet, controlled and supple ride even on 17in wheels.
It has plenty of grip and the steering has a precision and proportionality of effort not always found in an electric system. We were surprised at the tidy, well balanced handling, but don’t expect more than the merest hint of throttle adjustability in a bend. It’s not in this car’s nature.
