Rake Appeal { Road

The point of driving a Toyota Prius isn’t really the driving. If you care about driving as something other than mere transportation, don’t get a Prius. A Prius is a hybrid—not only of gasoline and electric—but also of boredom and pedantry. On the other hand, if what you care about is getting from one place to another in an efficient fashion, the Prius is, to recycle a phrase, “The Ultimate Driving Machine.” (My abject apologies to BMW.)

There is an aesthetic to driving a Prius. It’s just not to be found within the typical rubric of acceleration, cornering, and style. Our concentration when we’re behind the wheel is on the little colorful touch-screen readout in front of us. That’s where the fun is. That’s where the clever computer tells you when the gas engine is running, or when the battery is being charged, or when the battery alone is propelling the car and the gas mileage is infinite. An alternate readout tells you what mileage you got and how much you recharged the battery in five-minute increments since you last started the car. And a line of text below tells you how far you’ve gone since your last fill and what mileage you’ve gotten since that date a couple of weeks ago.

So, you don’t bury the tachometer needle on a Prius. You bury the instantaneous mileage bar. Hell, the Prius doesn’t even have a tachometer.

But, I do protest too much. It is a Toyota after all, and that means it’s a damn good car.

It accelerates just like you’d expect an underpowered compact car to accelerate, except a little better. The electric motor actually provides a little extra boost when you pop into passing gear. It’s absolutely capable of doing anything you ask on Twin Cities freeways, short of blowing the doors off the guy in the next lane, of course. But for running out to Costco or over to downtown St. Paul, you’re not going to be able to go faster than seventy anyway, and the car is certainly capable of that. Even better, when you are averaging fifteen miles per hour on 35W at 5:30 p.m. you’ll at least get some satisfaction in looking at that little screen and seeing that, for the last five minutes, you’ve averaged seventy-five miles per gallon.

Overall, the mileage for buzzing around town is probably around forty-five miles per gallon. You can do better if you really take it easy, and you can do worse if you drive it like you normally do. One of the foibles of the Prius’ celebrated hybrid system is that the car always runs the gas engine until the system gets warmed up—at least three miles or so, depending on the weather—and that means the mileage isn’t much better than a normal compact for those short trips. So, if you mostly live and drive in the city, the extra several thousand bucks you’ll pay for this car over what a Corolla or a Civic costs aren’t worth it. But, if you live in the suburbs, where the average trips are longer, the savings will add up. Will they add up in the long run to actual savings? Probably not, even with gas prices where they are now. When Iran’s daily oil production is cut off, though, that extra mileage is going to be a welcome mitigation.

There is one more reason to buy a Prius . I had the opportunity to experience the car’s stability under stressful circumstances first hand. To make a long story short, my companion was driving when we hit a spot of glare ice, which put us into a seventy-mile-per-hour skid sideways across 35W and into the ditch. Instead of rolling us over and over, as we would have done had we been in, say, an American SUV, the Prius was perfectly stable. In fact, it barely leaned as the electronic skid control system kicked in, applying just the right torque and traction to the wheels to keep us stable in the skid. As we banged to a stop in the ditch, my companion said, “Thank God we didn’t roll.”

“No,” I replied, “Thank Toyota.”—Oliver Tuanis


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