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The Prius we were told we couldn't have goes on UK sale after all – and it's good

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It seemed odd, perhaps even a bit cruel, when the Toyota Prius was nixed from its maker's UK line-up just as the model, after decades in existence, was hitting its stride in respect to capability and desirability.

Strange timing indeed, even if sales had been cannibalised by the C-HR crossover, to the extent that the Prius was finding only 600 or so buyers annually.

That was back in 2022, and the following year Toyota reversed its decision. Result: the fifth generation of the world’s most famous hybrid is now available over here, and anybody who hasn’t been paying attention might need a moment to adjust to its presence.

For one thing, the exterior design is now striking enough to turn heads as its glides down city streets – something the outgoing model does too, but only because Uber users are straining to make out the registration plate (with so many Priuses around, it’s the only way to work out if that particular silver Prius is yours).

Also, power. In the UK the Prius will be available only in PHEV form, and while the previous generation could also be had with a plug, total output was a modest 120bhp, whereas the new car makes fully 220bhp, which should give it a resolutely un-Prius-like turn of pace, should you boot it.

Combine those elements with an official electric range topping 50 miles and chassis modifications that ought to make the Prius a more comfortable and neater-handling prospect than ever before, and you have, on paper, a recipe for success.

What we will now learn is how good Toyota has been in the execution.

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DESIGN & STYLING

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Toyota Prius RT 2025 Review pan 33

When this car’s predecessor arrived in 2015, it introduced the much-heralded TNGA platform, which has since been slid under all manner of Toyota models and has in general impressed us with its versatility and the inherently good handling balance it generates.

The new Prius – codename XW60 – uses an evolution of the TNGA GA-C, touting plenty of new advanced safety technology as well as a larger NMC drive battery (its 13.6kWh usable capacity rises from 8.8kWh) and a bigger, 2.0-litre petrol engine, though the fundamental drivetrain layout remains the same as before.

The engine works through Toyota’s electronic continuously variable transaxle. Called an e-CVT, it doesn’t act like a traditional CVT with pulleys and cones. It uses a planetary gearset that allows the 161bhp drive motor and the 150bhp Atkinson-cycle petrol engine to operate at whichever speed suits them best, independently of one another.

The set-up is a light evolution of that found in the Mk4 Prius (which used the ‘P610’ transaxle), with slightly longer gear ratios, perhaps because the electric drive motor is now more powerful. The new transaxle also moves to dry-sump lubrication, which in theory improves efficiency, notably during all-electric running.

The suspension is by MacPherson struts at the front and trailing-arm ‘double wishbones’ at the back. Coil springs and passive dampers control matters with as little unnecessary complexity as possible, while the wheel and tyre package uses an almost anachronistically narrow 195-section tyre whether you go for the 17in or posher 19in wheel.

As for footprint, the car is 4.6m long – a length that used to position the Prius between the C-segment (Volkswagen Golf) and D-segment (Volkswagen Passat), but with the market diversifying as it has, those sectors are less defined today. It’s a bit shorter (46mm) than the Prius that went before it but has a longer wheelbase (50mm), while moving the apex of the roof is mainly to aid the aerodynamic prowess of what must be considered, by anybody’s standards, a striking silhouette.

Back in 1997, the Mk1 Prius was rather a dumpy proposition, if also quite sweet. Later in life, the model would adopt a one-box design with a dash of sci-fi intent and the look of something meant to be as efficient as possible. The Mk5 would seem to fully realise that school of design thought, and to our eyes it looks nothing short of sensational. The low-reaching nose in particular, with its embedded, scything headlights, has something of the Syd Mead creation about it, certainly.

There’s striking surfacing along the flanks too and it is a true wedge, with a windscreen rake not far off what you would find on a Lamborghini – just 21.6deg, to be precise.

INTERIOR

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Toyota Prius RT 2025 Review dash 19

It’s the raked windscreen that sets an unexpectedly exciting tone when you slide aboard the Prius. The place has a real cockpit feel, with a likeable ensconcement factor, although forward visibility is still good, because of the large quarterlights. Glass is in abundance for what is still not a particularly wide car, and it gives the Prius, with its slim but nicely sculpted seatbacks and its lowish beltline, something of a lounge feel.

It’s not an especially lavish lounge, admittedly. This is especially true for our entry-level (and supposedly the most efficient) Design test car, whose only adornments are two white inserts in the fabric seats and a shiny plastic strip across the convex-arcing dash. Excel grade is a little plusher, with synthetic leather upholstery and a marginally more interesting range of material finishes, although both tiers have heated seats and a steering rim that’s nicely trimmed.

In general, the new Prius isn’t quite as nice to sit inside as the equivalent Golf, although it is ergonomically sound and, with that sense of light and space, easy company whether you’re gliding along a motorway or negotiating rat runs in rush hour. The only blemish is the relationship between the 7in digital driver display and the steering wheel. Toyota has gone for the Peugeot i-Cockpit approach, and it means that having the wheel at just the right height can obscure the readout.

It’s shame, because in other respects the layout is well considered: there are physical controls for everything you would want one for and everything is where you would expect to find it. Although on the drab side visually, especially for a near-£40,000 car, the cabin’s perceived quality is also good. The fit feels solid and tough.

As you move back from the front seats, the Prius becomes a little less impressive. Rear leg room is excellent but head room is tight, and not just for six-footers. The boot floor is also high-set, while the swoopy roofline exacerbates this in a way it doesn’t with any of the Prius’s hatchback rivals. 

The official boot capacity of 273 litres is an exact match to that of the equivalent PHEV Golf, but that figure represents space only up to the parcel shelf. Hatchbacks have a good amount of extra, ‘unofficial’ capacity above that point, whereas the Prius doesn’t. 

The Toyota’s capacity may be ungenerous, but it shouldn’t be regarded as a deal-breaker in a car so preoccupied with efficiency. Note also that there is no ski hatch, only a 60/40 split for the rear seatbacks.

ENGINES & PERFORMANCE

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Toyota Prius RT 2025 Review rear corner 29

Toyota evidently saw fit to give the Prius performance to match its new-found visual impact: the Mk5 car is one of the quickest in its class, with a 0-60mph time of 6.6sec. The anaemic Prius no longer exists.

Now, extracting this kind of acceleration involves thrashing the 2.0-litre engine – a procedure you’re unlikely to revel in, because of its coarseness under heavy loads and what feels like a deliberate lack of NVH mitigation measures (Toyota, perhaps reasonably, doesn’t expect owners to be gunning their cars regularly so hasn’t expended money, time and kilograms making it a pleasanter experience).

The Prius is far more at ease with itself when driven as intended: with a light right foot. It’s now that this PHEV set-up starts to work very neatly indeed, transitioning into EV running and sustaining it so doggedly that you would swear the battery pack was more than 13.6kWh. This is one of the car’s undoubted strengths. It seems to harvest electricity very effectively, and never allows the battery to run entirely flat, meaning it always has the necessary electrical energy to kill the engine on light throttle loads or give you that zippy injection of responsive torque when you lean on the accelerator pedal.

If you do happen to be carrying plenty of battery charge, slotting the car into EV mode is as simple as pressing a button on the transmission tunnel, and there’s another mode for recharging the battery on the move. You have all the tools you need to use the Prius as suits the situation.

The level of regenerative braking can also be increased by slotting the gear selector into ‘B’. However, the strength of the regen effect isn’t variable on the fly: you have to go into the driver display via the steering wheel controls and alter it on one of the menus. It’s a convoluted approach, and one that’s mirrored for the ADAS, which can only be altered in the same fashion and when stationary. That’s right: there’s no shortcut to turn off the traffic-sign recognition, for example. It’s one of the few areas where the Prius experience can genuinely frustrate, and it’s a shame, because in its basic operation, the Mk5 is one of the breeziest cars around.

We should also highlight the car’s braking performance, which is lacking in an emergency-stop scenario. Nobody would expect such slender tyres, with a compound developed for low rolling resistance, to haul the Prius up on the spot, but 49.0m from 70-0mph in the dry is mediocre, and not helped at all by ABS whose calibration feels a little agricultural in its workings.

RIDE & HANDLING

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Toyota Prius RT 2025 Review rear corner 27

You might be surprised at how neatly the Prius handles. There isn't a lot of grip and tighter bends will have the front axle scrubbing wide if you’re even fractionally enthusiastic with your entry speed, but within its modest envelope of lateral adhesion, the Prius is composed and balanced and has a taut yet absorptive manner to its body control that makes it satisfying to flow along a B-road.

This is yet another successful outing for the TNGA platform, it seems, helped by the fact the Prius, at least in basic Design form, weighs only 1542kg. By comparison, the Golf 1.5 TSI eHybrid we tested lasted last year weighed nearly 100kg more. A centre of gravity lower than the Prius has ever had before also helps.

With this car’s innately good balance, all Toyota needed to do was not mess up the steering – and it hasn’t. This light rack is modestly sped but the smallish diameter of the rim, along with the decent chassis, gives the Prius a nice sense of… not exactly agility but something far from turgid, as has been the case with this car in the past. It’s all decidedly cohesive.

As for comfort and refinement, the level the Mk5 Prius hits is quite dependent on your style of driving and the quality of the road surface beneath you, but it can be very high indeed. Cruise down a smooth A-road, feathering the accelerator pedal, and the car will conjure up isolation and ride quality in the realm of what you would expect from a premium mid-sized executive saloon. This is especially true on 17in wheels, with their almost cartoonishly tall sidewalls, and the added plushness this yields. 

Equally, work the engine harder than it wants to be worked, atop a threadbare stretch of bitumen, and the Prius’s composure is knocked especially hard in the form of road roar and engine noise. There is also perhaps a touch more wind noise than you would expect from such a slippery body at high speeds, where the car’s adaptive cruise control can also irk, over-reacting to upcoming traffic and slowing the car down unnecessarily, only to then cane the engine to get you back up to your chosen cruising speed. You can, however, programme the system to avoid any undertaking, which is useful, and a feature lacking in plenty of more expensive cars.

Overall, the Prius doesn’t have Ford Focus levels of incision or poise or Golf levels of rolling refinement but is in general pleasant company day to day.

MPG & RUNNING COSTS

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Toyota Prius RT 2025 Review front corner 30

Like everything else, the pricing of the PHEV Prius hasn’t been left unscathed by inflation, although the effect isn’t as dramatic as you might expect.

When the old PHEV went off sale in 2022, it cost £35,345, whereas the new car, with its improved infotainment, additional performance and far greater electric range, starts at less than £38,000, rising to around £41,000 if you opt for Excel grade (which, owing to its larger wheels and marginally increased weight, doesn’t manage the headline economy figure of 564.9mpg). That said, the Mk5 Prius still isn’t in any sense the value proposition in this class. In fact, the class leader, the Golf 1.5 TSI eHybrid, starts at a little over £36,000 in Match trim and outperforms the Toyota in electric range and all-round refinement.

What sort of numbers, then, can the Prius owner expect? As ever, that’s going to depend on how you use the car, and how seriously you take its plug-in capability in general. Charge up the 13.6kWh battery overnight (a full charge takes around two and a half hours from a wallbox) and use the car for a typical commute (let’s say 25 miles each way) and your weekly economy is going to be in high triple figures.

Toyota claims an electric range of 53 miles, although during our ‘everyday’ efficiency test, the car returned a stellar figure of 5.4kWh, which translates to more than 70 miles. Out in the real world, you might just achieve such a lofty total with careful urban use, but 45 miles is more realistic. The Golf, with its 19.7kWh of usable capacity, will manage close 70 miles of EV range much more easily than the Prius.

There is then the petrol side of the equation, and this isn’t quite as frugal as we would have hoped. With the battery as depleted as we could make it (no easy task, given how diligently the Prius ensures there’s always some charge to go around), the car returned 56.1mpg in our touring test – somewhat less than the car’s wedge-like shape suggests. A figure of 66.0mpg in our everyday test was more encouraging, translating to a typical range of 581 miles from just the small, 40-litre tank. This represents plenty of convenience, even if you never charge the car.

And what if you’re on a long journey, starting with the battery fully charged and being careful with your right foot while sustaining motorway speeds? You will want to manually slot the driveline into Hybrid mode (HEV) to stop it from chomping through its electric range straight away, but if you do this, a combined 75mpg is on the cards, giving the Prius an all-out range of 660 miles or so. This is one area in which the Toyota would seem to get the better of the Golf.

Other rivals include PHEV versions of the big-booted Peugeot 308, the BMW X2, the Audi A3 and the Mercedes-Benz A-Class, not to mention the Seat Leon e-Hybrid. In this company, the Prius’s electric range is mid-ranking, but its hybrid powertrain works in such a way that hugely impressive real-world economy is perhaps more achievable for owners who do attempt to maximise it.

VERDICT

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Toyota Prius RT 2025 Review front static 22

The Prius has come rather a long way since the original, dumpy-looking version in 1997 showed off a novel drive system but didn’t want to seem too weird doing it (unlike, say, the first Honda Insight).

The Prius still has one of the best hybrid drive systems on sale but has injected serious doses of dynamism, performance and sleekness into the mix with this fifth generation. This car, although it has definite rivals in the hatchback class, also finds itself in relatively clear airspace, due to the fact that most car makers are now focused on higher-riding crossovers and SUVs.

It leaves the Prius as not simply a good-looking hatch-cum-coupé but also a smooth-riding and not unenjoyable family option – one capable of sky-high frugality if you harness its plug-in nature (and even if you don’t, frankly). We’re glad it’s back.

Richard Lane

Richard Lane, Autocar
Title: Deputy road test editor

Richard joined Autocar in 2017 and like all road testers is typically found either behind a keyboard or steering wheel (or, these days, a yoke).

As deputy road test editor he delivers in-depth road tests and performance benchmarking, plus feature-length comparison stories between rival cars. He can also be found presenting on Autocar's YouTube channel.

Mostly interested in how cars feel on the road – the sensations and emotions they can evoke – Richard drives around 150 newly launched makes and models every year. His job is then to put the reader firmly in the driver's seat.