2025 Toyota Prius PHEV – The BEST or WORST of both worlds?
the Prius used to be the one car that everybody associated with hybrid vehicles but today hybrids are everywhere especially from Toyota the Sienna the Camry the Crown the Land Cruiser and even the RAV 4 are all available exclusively as hybrids you can’t get one of those without getting a hybrid powertrain and it’s kind of made it difficult for the Prius to have purpose and as a result Prius sales have dwindled over the past decade but if they were going to keep this iconic name plate around it was going to have to check some boxes if it were going to have any chance of competing in this modern era it needed to be the most efficient gas-powered car available check it needed to be a goodlooking car definitely check and finally it could no longer be a slow and boring vehicle checkish i mean the last generation Prius took around 10 seconds to get from 0 to 60 mph while this does it in 6.6 seconds it’s not speedy but it’s definitely quicker than many economy sedans and as a result of this valiant effort Prius sales have started to recover in recent years this Prius that I spent the last week with is the 2025 Prius Plug-in Hybrid which used to be called the Prius Prime but as of 2025 they’ve dropped the Prime name and now on the back it just says FEV the Prius Plug-in Hybrid has a 13.6 6 kWh battery which is several times larger than the standard Prius but not quite as big as a standard EV which is anywhere from 75 to 100 kwatt hours and what that means is you can actually charge this car using the port over here on the passenger side overnight using a standard wall outlet and it will give you 44 miles of pure electric driving range and when you run out of juice this will behave as a normal hybrid vehicle giving you up to 52 m per gallon depending on the trim and because of that many people will say that this is kind of the best of both worlds because the average daily commute in the US is less than 44 miles it’s more closer to 40 and when you run out of juice it becomes a hybrid so you have basically zero range anxiety with a plug-in hybrid vehicle such as this compared to the standard hybrid Prius which has 194 horsepower or 196 with the all-wheel drive setup this has 220 horsepower but it still uses the same 2 L engine in it it just has more powerful electric motors giving it more power now because of that larger 13.6 kWh battery which is located in the back kind of between the wheels this is only available as a front-wheel drive vehicle but also because of that battery this is kind of a heavier vehicle in fact at 3500 lb it’s kind of approaching the weight of a Camry despite being a much smaller vehicle all right now obviously what makes the Prius so special is how it looks because this is not only a goodlooking Prius but a good-looking car in general and let’s just do a little walk around because I do want to go over the design of this car which is absolutely fantastic now starting in the front you will find over here in the middle a nice big block so if you live in a state which does not require a front plate that might be a little bit annoying you do have your front camera over there and your radar assembly likely hidden under there and then you’ll find over here your hammerhead headlight design which has pretty much made its way into every Toyota vehicle nowadays and if you’re wondering where it started it started with this Prius now moving over to the side because this headlight assembly does not have amber elements because it probably wasn’t made just for the US market you do have the kind of compliant amber markers on the side interestingly this car has very weird wheels which is honestly one of my biggest gripes with this car so you got a 19-in wheel with a low profile tire but not only that you have a very very skinny tire this is a very skinny tire i think it’s a 195 making this essentially a one-ofa-kind tire so not only does this car not have a spare tire but if you get a puncture finding a replacement tire might be a little bit difficult and if you do find one it might cost you a little more money got a last gen Prius over here that’s kind of cool but moving on we do have a very large windshield this thing is massive because it is so aggressively sloped and because it is so interesting over here you have a weird windshield wiper assembly this right here is kind of housing a double joint to allow this windshield wiper to give all the coverage you need to wipe those windows up top you got the solar roof which is a $600 option it has a peak output of 180 watts which on a good day under ideal conditions can get you three to four miles of pure electric driving range which means over the course of a year if you leave this car in the sun all day technically you could probably get well over 1,000 mi and here in California that would come out to around $100 in gas per year saved with this solar roof so since it’s $600 it could be a decent investment but keep in mind that this car comes standard with a glass roof which is a $1,000 option and you’d be giving it up with this solar roof one of my favorite things about this car even though I hate shark fin antennas is that this has the shark fin molded into the roof which looks really really cool it almost looks like an actual shark fin moving in water i kind of like that now again we have a really really aggressively sloping roof line in the back and there is no rear windshield wiper which isn’t the case on the last gen there’s actually a last gen that just pulled up over there and it doesn’t have a rear wiper but what this one has but I don’t think that one does is Prius written into the rear defroster grid which is kind of cool now unfortunately one downside though is as you can see here there’s no window over here this does not have a window this used to be kind of a nice additional visibility point for the hatchback of the Prius but in this car it’s just completely blacked out which means you’re missing a little bit of rear visibility which is of course replaced with a digital rearview mirror but I kind of liked having that glass there now let’s check out the back seats which opens with this door right here the door handle’s kind of hidden into the window area there’s a little button behind this door handle which opens it electronically or you have a mechanical button that you could push down in case the battery is dead or something which allows you to open it that way now hopping in I have this front seat as far back as it can go this is my driving position and very impressively I still have about an inch of leg room which is actually pretty decent for a small vehicle now unfortunately I don’t really have all that much headroom if I’m sat back my head is totally just up against the ceiling but if I do crouch a little bit it is manageable now unfortunately if you are hot back here there aren’t any AC vents but fortunately if you’re cold back here you do have heated seats which is pretty interesting you’ve also got two USBC ports back here and a very very beefy 1,500 W outlet back here which is crazy i don’t know what you’re going to do with that kind of power in the back seats now up front the Prius has a very nice interior now in terms of material quality it’s not the highest in the world because it’s a lot of plastic but in terms of their selection of materials and all the different types of plastics being used and as well as the fit and finish which is phenomenal in this car it’s actually a pretty decent interior for example this car kind of has this maroon red on the dashboard as well as this red accent lighting and you got two different reds going on here which is weird but then if you look at the seat you will notice that it does have two different types of reds which does kind of match the dashboard you also have all kinds of weird gimmicky Easter egg labels in this car for example this is the kind of center storage but underneath there is a hidden storage compartment and it says #hidden compartment over here you have your wireless charger and inside it says #wireless charger and inside your center console underneath a little mat in here it says # console box and inside the glove box it says # glovebox and over in the back seats behind the seat belts it says #safetyverse there’s all kinds of interesting Easter eggs in this car including at the end of the dash which has a silhouette of a Prius the seats in this car are very comfortable they are heated they are ventilated they’re great the driver seat is eight-way adjustable but interestingly even though the passenger seats are heated and ventilated they are manually adjustable which is kind of interesting for this price point you also have physical climate controls which is fantastic but it is just limited to a single zone but since you got heated and ventilated seats on both sides it’s not really all that big of a deal you also have a heated steering wheel the steering wheel is a little on the smaller side but the heating function is all the way around it’s not just at your kind of 3 or 9:00 position it’s pretty good and then you have the infotainment screen which is pretty decent but not the best in the world it’s a very nice screen at 12 in but it’s kind of limited when it comes to functionality you do have wireless CarPlay Android Auto all that good stuff and you do have an integrated map which is very nice and decently responsive but it would be nice if there was more features because we do have a really large display we also have a digital rearview mirror up here which is very helpful because this car has very limited visibility in the back because there is no longer that kind of split window in the hatchback area so even though this is a $200 option it might actually be worth it for some people and then we have this screen right here one problem a lot of people have with this car is this screen over in the back which is kind of like a gauge cluster heads-up display combo with some advantages and some disadvantages normally you got your gauge cluster located behind the steering wheel within the steering wheel now this is located and designed to be above the steering wheel and the problem with that that some people have is that it forces you to have a very specific driving position you might have to have the steering wheel lower than what you normally drive with but that is something that you will get used to over time and to me that’s not really a problem and one of the benefits of having a screen instead of a heads-up display is that if you wear polarized glasses you can still see everything on the screen but the problem I have with this screen is that it is extremely complicated there is just so much information on this screen you’ve got your clock you’ve got your gear selector your fuel gauge your driving assist icons some more driving assist icons the driving mode that you’re in the speed that you’re driving in miles per hour as well as kilometers per hour you have All right let’s have a look at the hatch where you will find a pretty okay cargo area it’s not the biggest in the world and because this is the plug-in hybrid you do have a slightly higher floor which means you have a little bit less space but because it’s a hatchback it’s still decent back here over here you do have your 12volt battery taking up a little bit more space back here and then on the left side you do have a 1500 W outlet another one which is crazy for this car you could put a fridge back here underneath the floor you do have no spare tire and not as much space as the normal Prius but you can easily fit those cables back there you also do have this kind of flimsy cover but it’s better than nothing all right let’s drive the Prius but first we got to go over the different driving modes since this is kind of an unusual car right now I got the car charged up to 44% and the way that I did that actually because I don’t have a plug at home is I click this button right here hold it down and it will enable charging mode so I hold that it says charging mode on the top the engine fires up and it charges the battery it will charge the battery up to 80% and that’s the only way I was able to test this car out in EV only mode so I’m kind of glad that it had that feature it took me about maybe three maybe 4 hours of driving to go from 0 to 80% over the course of 2 or 3 days and after that I did kind of drive it as an EVON vehicle which it automatically defaults to when it has charge by the way I want to emphasize that this is not the way the vehicle is intended to be driven charging mode is really kind of just there to ensure that you have enough charge to say operate in a specific city area that restricts gas engines which really isn’t a thing in the US besides when in charging mode the Prius is quite a bit less pleasing to drive with the engine always on and under load causing considerable vibration throughout the cabin especially when stopped to get moving we got the traditional Prius style shifter you kind of move it to the left put it into reverse and let’s get going got the nice 360 camera there pretty cool 360 camera you can see over here that it kind of has a little memory of what it’s driving over and it’s actually really accurate and very very impressive i mean I don’t know it’s really cool i mean I got a stop sign coming up over here and look it just shows the stop sign under the car that’s so cool so right now we’ve got 44% battery and the car is in HV mode actually I’m going to put it in EV mode and when you’re in EV mode the car is just 100% EV and it will not engage the gas engine until you get up to like 85 m an hour or something like that and when it is in EV mode it is a little bit slower but it’s certainly not super slow i mean step on it it’s not bad it feels electric it’s got that instantaneous torque but you’re not getting the full 100% 220 horsepower that this car has in order to get that you have to have the engine turned on and warmed up so in EV mode this car is actually really nice it’s really quiet it’s really good and the fact that it stays in EV mode regardless of your speed is kind of nice let’s do a little 0 to 60 in EV mode so here we are zero brake torque it i don’t even think it does anything oh the engine turned on actually maybe because I brake torquked it there we go pretty decent pull honestly but at around 40 mph it really does taper off still going in 60 not bad but it took a while to get from 40 to 60 the power really does taper off from 0 to 30 it honestly feels great it doesn’t even feel anything different than when in hybrid mode all right let’s do another 0 to 60 but this time we’re in hybrid mode i’m actually going to put the car in sport mode and let’s see what we get i’ll brake torque it this time much better pull especially after 30 that was a lot quicker and I saw the traction control light come on after like 40 miles an hour or something so it’s really good i mean this is a really nice car and although it doesn’t handle as well as the Civic it’s got a little bit of roll to it maybe the standard Prius handles better because it’s lighter this does feel not quite as planted as the Civic Hybrid it’s still a pretty decent vehicle this model comes with acoustic glass but that doesn’t mean that it’s a quiet vehicle in fact it is kind of on the louder side because we are rocking lowprofile tires that are pumped up to like 50 PSI so it’s definitely not a quiet vehicle so that is kind of something to keep in mind if you want a quiet riding experience so is the Prius plug-in hybrid better than the normal Prius or better than an outright EV well maybe for the right person if you are the kind of person who has a charger at home and you drive less than 44 miles per day then this can be a pretty good solution giving you mostly EV range and if you’re also the kind of person who frequently takes longer trips meaning more than 300 m which is what you get with a normal EV then yes this could actually be the best of both worlds having two solutions in one but keep in mind at 48 to 52 mp gallon this Prius is giving you worse fuel economy in hybrid only mode versus the standard Prius and in that sense you could just get a Toyota Camry hybrid which gives you around 50 m per gallon depending on the trim and you get a larger vehicle that’s more comfortable and more spacious and it even has a spare tire so depending on how you look at it the Prius plug-in hybrid or any plug-in hybrid in general could be the best of both worlds or the worst of both worlds mod i mean when this car is in EVON mode it’s technically a worse EV with limited range and power because it’s lugging around a gas engine and when it’s in hybrid only mode it’s technically a worse hybrid because it’s carrying a larger than necessary battery so in that sense it really just depends on how you look at it with that being said thanks so much for watching thanks to Toyota for loaning me the Prius for a week
After a week with the latest version of the Prius Plug-in Hybrid, previously known as the Prius Prime and here’s how it went.
The Prius is no longer boring, it’s cool! This 2025 Prius Plug-in Hybrid is a hybrid vehicle with a large 13.6kWh battery allowing it to be driven up to 44 miles on pure electricity when fully charged. When the battery is depleted, the Prius Prime will act as a traditional hybrid vehicle, getting up to 52 miles per gallon depending on the trim. The larger, heavier battery reduces its fuel-economy by several points compared to the standard Prius when operated in hybrid mode.
Some argue that Plug-in hybrids are the best of both worlds, and for some drivers they can be. The average daily commute in the US is less than 40 miles, allowing a PHEV owner to drive purely on electricity while only relying on gas for longer trips. This of course would make longer trips and road trips more convenient, especially thanks to a complete EV + gas range of 550 miles.
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