Living With The 2024 Toyota Prius Prime

foreign [Music] I spent the last few days driving the 2023 Toyota Prius Prime xse and I wanted to make a different type of video than what I usually create so that I can share some of my insights and some of my Impressions just driving the car around this video is going to be longer and more opinionated than my usual videos in my usual videos I just do a walk around the car inside and out and I talk about some of the buttons and features but this time around I wanted to talk a little bit more about what it's like to drive the car a lot of viewers of the channel have suggested that I start driving the cars in my videos but I wanted to keep the overview videos strictly about the car and not about how I feel about the car so that's why I'm making this different type of video where I'm going to talk about the driving and what it's like to have driven the car now for the past three days I want to also mention that I'm still going to be doing an overview video of the 2023 Prius Prime so that might already be up by the time that this video goes up so I'll leave a link in the description the first link in the description is going to be the video for the overview of this car so if you're less interested in how this car drives and how I feel about it you can just watch that video if you just want to learn more about the buttons the features and just where things are the last thing that I want to say before I start this video is if you enjoy this new style then give it a like And subscribe to the channel and I'll make more videos like this for other cars so getting into the 2023 Toyota Prius Prime this is the third plug-in hybrid Prius that Toyota has made back in 2012 they came out with the Prius Plug-In and it wasn't called Prime at the time they didn't start using the prime until the second plug-in hybrid that they made so in 2012 we got the Prius Plug-In and that had an 11 mile range on electric only and it had 134 net combined horsepower and that one got about 94 miles per gallon combined then in 2017 we got the introduction of the Prius Prime this is the first time that they really used the prime to symbolize that this is a plug-in hybrid and that one had 121 horsepower a total EV mileage of 25 miles and that one did 130 three miles per gallon and now for the 2023 model year Toyota released the all-new Prius Prime their third ever plug-in hybrid Prius and it's a total redesign it actually looks a lot better now and it has a lot more power so it's it's longer it's lower it's wider than last year's Prius and it has a hundred more horsepower so we've gone from 121 to 220 horsepower the EV mileage jumped from 25 miles to 40 miles on all electric and they now get up to 127 miles per gallon on the base SE version but this xse version that I've been driving for the past few days does 114 miles per gallon while Toyota added 100 extra horsepower I think they're really just trying to break the stigma of the Prius being a slow car because this isn't a particularly super fast car or anything it still has a 0-60 that's like about six or seven seconds it's a lot faster than the old 10 seconds 0-60 that we had in last year's Prius Prime but it's not a super fast car it's just not a super slow car anymore this video is also going to be split up in to a couple of different sections so I'll leave timestamps Below in the description if you just want to skip around to whatever you're most interested in the first thing that we're going to get into is going to be the looks and styling foreign [Music] moving outside let's take a quick walk around the Prius Prime here so like I mentioned earlier in the introduction this is lower longer and wider than the last generation Prius Prime and it's got a lot more of an aerodynamic style so it kind of swoops back a lot and a lot of people say this sort of looks like a wedge but overall I think Toyota did a pretty good job designing this new Prius Prime where it doesn't look hideous anymore like the last generation Prius prime a lot of people kind of just didn't like the way that that one looked one of the more interesting sort of design choices that they made here that I kind of actually really like is that the rear door handle is sort of just back here as like a little button so it's not actually a handle that you pull like the ones that you have up in the front in the back we got a couple of new badges there's this new Toyota Beyond zero badge over here right beside where it says Prime and they also spelled out Prius letter by letter which I think is pretty cool and one of my favorite things about the design of the new Prius is probably the headlights so the headlights have this like Lobster Claw appearance so them over here in the front you can see they kind of cut very sharp angles so we go up down and right so here let me go ahead and unlock this Prius Prime as well so you guys can see what that looks like when the lights are lit up when you're using your turn signals the color options that Toyota has available for the Prius Prime are going to be cutting edge which is their silver color they have Guardian gray which is obviously their gray color midnight Black Metallic is their black the reservoir blue is sort of a dark blue they're supersonic red which is a really bright red and this one right here is wind chill Pearl which is totus pearl white the last two that I mentioned the supersonic red and the windshield Pearl costs an extra 425 dollars from the factory if you want these colors now while the Prius does look good in this new design I think that it's been over hyped a little bit online I've seen a lot of people talk about how you know it looks better than it really does I think it just looks fine it's not hideous and I don't think any anybody would be embarrassed to drive in the new Prius Prime around although it it's not like a gorgeous sports car or anything like that so I think it's very inoffensive in the way that it looks foreign [Music] next up I want to talk about my driving Impressions so when I first wrote the script for this video I had about 300 miles behind the wheel now I have closer to 450 miles behind the wheel so I've spent the majority of my driving driving around San Francisco and so I feel like I've got a good feel of driving this on the highway but also on busy city streets when it comes to driving the Prius Prime the first thing that I wanted to talk about is the pickup because Priuses and Prius primes have sort of been known for having slow pickup in the past when I first jumped into this Prius Prime I didn't expect a whole ton I knew that we had 100 extra horsepower in this one versus last year's but I wasn't expecting this thing to take off so I was really pleasantly surprised to find that this scene has more than enough power to help you take off whenever you need to make like a Quick Lane change or something like that in the grand scheme of things 220 horsepower is not a huge number there's tons of cars that blow past that 220 number but maybe it's just because of the size of this car it's a bit smaller than you know SUVs on the road and just your typical midsize sedan it's it's a smaller car it feels like 220 is more than enough power driving this car around there was never really a point where I wanted to say I need more power it was always well I need this power I stepped on it and I got exactly what I needed the second thing that I wanted to talk about when it comes to driving the Prius Prime is just how loud and just how quiet it is I feel like the 2023 Prius Prime is both loud and quiet at the same time and it really sort of depends on what situation that you're in so if you're standing still or if you're at a red light or if even like right now I'm sitting in the car with the car turned on it's really quiet the only thing that you can really hear is just the air coming out of the vents but in most situations especially when you're driving slow the car is dead quiet but there are some situations where the car was a lot louder than I expected it to be so for example driving through San Francisco going up and down some of those Hills especially when you're going up the hill it really sounded like the engine was struggling now it never gave me that feeling like it's not enough power because the car was the car was moving up the hill just fine but it was just very loud and then another thing another example of how the car can be quiet and loud at the same time is when you're driving on the highway just because you're not hearing the engine so much doesn't mean that you're not hearing the wind noise and you're not hearing the other cars passing you or you passing other cars so I feel like the Prius Prime isn't as well insulated as some other cars it might not be as insulated as even a Toyota Camry but just driving by other cars it's pretty loud and also it does have quite a lot of wind noise on the highway so it's quiet at some things but it's also loud in other ways and I know that this isn't a luxury car so I can't expect it to be as quiet as driving like Alexis down the highway but it's just something that I noticed it's like if you don't notice the sound of an engine you start to notice some of the other sounds on the road and they start to stand out a little bit more the third thing that I wanted to talk about when it comes to driving the car is the handling and I don't want to be too critical about the handling of this Prius Prime just because it's not a sports car so I don't want to spend too much time focusing on it but the handling actually impressed me it is lower and it's a little bit wider than the outgoing Prius so of course it's going to handle a little bit better but the car felt very planted and going through turns it felt more than fine no complaints the last thing the fourth and last thing that I wanted to talk about when it comes to driving the Prius Prime is about the regenerative braking so all of the Priuses have had regenerative braking you'll see it on your shifter pattern as the letter B so if you shift into that b what will happen is when you let your foot off of the accelerator pedal the car is going to slow down a little bit faster than usual and with the 2023 Prius Prime this is the first time that I've seen in a Toyota that we have three different levels of regenerative braking so in the settings you can actually adjust how strong that regenerative braking is and when I've been using it I've been using it in that strongest setting so when I let go of the accelerator it slows down the car a lot but if you've driven a Tesla it's not as strong as the regenerative braking on that if you let go of the accelerator pedal on a Tesla for example it almost lunges you forward a little bit with this it's not the case but if you are going to be driving this thing around I would probably recommend putting it into that regenerative braking mode instead of drive so that you slow down a little bit more for two reasons the first is that it's going to recharge the battery a little bit more as you drive and the second reason is that it's going to put a little bit less wear on your brakes so by slowing down the car using the drivetrain instead of the brakes you're going to preserve the life of your brakes a little bit more but you're also going to be giving yourself a little bit more range foreign [Music] we're going to go over the interior and how comfortable slash uncomfortable it is to sit inside here for extended periods of time so the first thing that we're going to talk about are these seats and all of the Prius primes have a black and red sort of theme going on inside them and these seats right here are Toyota's soft text leather seats so the xse and the xse premium are going to get the softex leather material it's a fake synthetic leather if you get the base SE model it's going to be a fabric seat but it's still going to have this black and red theming to it and you can see here these seats are bolstered very well so we have these sides that sort of protrude out and hug your body as you're sitting in them which can be a good and bad thing it's a good thing because your body is not going to roll around if you're taking turns but it's sort of a bad thing I sort of felt a little bit uncomfortable after driving for a couple of hours another reason why I didn't particularly like the seat of the Prius Prime here so much was this lower back section it kind of humps out a little bit and it always felt like there was something pressing against my lower back and this is with the lumbar support turned all the way down so this is with as least amount of Hump as possible we can actually press this out even more right here just like that and so if I put it all the way down it still felt like something was poking my lower back after like two or three hours of driving now getting inside let's shut the door here one of the things that really bothered me throughout my time of being inside the Prius Prime was not having enough space for my knees so I'll go ahead and position the camera right here down to my knees right here by the steering wheel my knees were constantly resting right here right next to the cup holder and also right here just by your window switches so I was constantly going like this and I felt like I didn't have enough width over here in the driver's leg area to fully be comfortable now I could have probably slid the seat back a little bit and extended my legs some more but it wouldn't have been a natural driving position for me so I like to sit a little bit closer to the steering wheel and to do that I have to kind of put my knees up a little bit and I feel like there just really wasn't enough space for me in this interior so my knees were constantly all day just pressing up right here against this armrest and also over here against these cup holders right here the center console area now I'm complaining about the comfortability of this interior especially in this Driver's Seat but I kind of want to reiterate the point that this is a smaller car and this is not a large SUV so if this was a large SUV it would be a little bit of a different story but I guess I sort of expected a little bit more more driver comfort from here and I really didn't think that this was going to be as big of an issue as it ended up being for me because after a whole day of driving my knees were just hurting really bad from just resting against the center console and the armrest over there now jumping into the passenger seat this is a little bit less of an issue but it's still an issue and I think the reason why I'm having this issue is because this arm rest right here just by the window switches it's really a lot wider than it needs to be so if I shut the door over here you can see my knee is still going to press right here up against this armrest and against the center console now if you're the passenger you sort of have a little bit more control in the way that you rest your legs because you don't have to reach any pedals but it can still be a little bit uncomfortable especially if you like to spread your legs for some comfort one of the things that I really like about this interior is this red accent over here that sort of stretches across the dashboard and there's actually also an ambient light that also runs across the entire dashboard so when it gets dark outside and the lights turn on the ambient light in here will also turn on and it's a red ambient light which adds just a really nice touch to this black and red interior we also have a new shifter design over here which I'm a really big fan of because if you guys are familiar with what the old shifter looked like in the previous Prius this one looks a lot less like a toy and I'm also very glad that they're going away with these huge shifters that you pretty much row up and down this one is super simple to use so you have a button right here that you press to put it in park you can go left and up for reverse hold left for neutral left and down for a drive and then if you want to enter a regenerative braking mode you just push down while you're already in drive so this right here it's super simple super easy to use and it doesn't take up a lot of space either so this right here is a huge win and also speaking of huge wins in the interior I'm a huge fan of this wireless phone charger over here you can see it does say wireless charger inside over there but you pretty much just slide your phone inside and it starts charging and it works surprisingly well now it doesn't work if you have a big case on your phone but I'm not somebody who wears a case on their phones and I pretty much just get in the car slide my phone in and it works every time and I think that this is a great solution to Toyota's previous really bad wireless chargers because Toyota used to like to put wireless chargers sort of up somewhere here on the dash or they would have it inside a little storage area and it would always slide around but this right here just kind of sliding your phone inside here perfect solution no problems with the wireless charger so that's two huge wins for Toyota in a row let's go on to another huge positive for this car and that would be this 12.3 inch Toyota audio multimedia display I love this thing so much now the bass screen if you get an xse model is an 8 inch screen which I would not recommend I think that if you get an xse trim level you should just pay the extra 700 and get the optional 12.3 inch display just because everything looks so much better in this wide angle now we do have our wireless apple carplay right now there's also a Toyota interface which you can see is loading up right now they put the volume knob over here on the passenger side so the passenger can adjust the volume very easily as well if they want to the driver's side has theirs on the steering wheel but moving on over to this software over here like I said this has Toyota's new audio and multimedia software so we have a built-in Google Maps we also have our music over here so right now my music is turned off you have our phone which right now it's connected to my iPhone we have our vehicle information over here and our settings as well Toyota's new software also supports Wireless Apple carplay and wireless Android auto so during the Bluetooth pairing setup It'll ask you if you want to enable apple carplay or enable Android auto and every time you get in the car it just connects you press right here on the top left and it takes you straight into apple carplay and I'm just a big fan of wide screens so to me personally I think that this 12.3 inch screen upgrade is very well worth the 700 extra dollars especially if you're going to be keeping this car for many many years this is pretty much a must-have I really enjoyed using the screen in my time having the Prius Prime but the center infotainment display isn't the only display that we have in the Prius Prime we also get this 7 inch mid the multi-information display which I think is not so much of a win and the reason why is I feel like this display right here can get very cluttered with just too much information at a quick glance when you're just driving it's super easy to read just to get the speed that you're driving at but there is sometimes too much stuff going on here especially when you have kind of warning messages or just any messages going on on the left side and you can hide that away but there can be too much stuff going on on the screen so just a quick breakdown of what we have on the screen here we have our hybrid indicator over here our charge level the speed what gear you're in how much fuel you have what safety features are activated how much range you have left what time it is and as I've been driving this Prius Prime for the last few days I've had pretty much everything turned on all of the safety features turned on everything enabled on the mid I had it show as much information as possible and that can be a little bit too much now you can also just go into the settings from the steering wheel so you can press this button right here to get some more information and you can just kind of scroll down over to the settings and you can change the meter settings so you can hide some of these things to make it a little bit of a cleaner setup but just the way that I've been driving it and having all of the information displayed sometimes it felt like there was too much stuff going on especially with all of these safety icons down here there's just a lot going on in this bottom right side that just looking at it without knowing what everything is the average driver is probably just going to be very confused and ignore a lot of the stuff that they're seeing so if you get one of these and you're curious how to hide all this stuff you can just go in here and just select what different things you want the meter to show and what things you want it to hide but overall you know this display is pretty much just the exact same setup as we had in Toyota's electric car the bz4x you know it sort of props up like this behind the steering wheel so in a lot of the driving clips that I'm going to show it's going to look like the top of the steering wheel is covering the screen if I put the camera up to my eye level you can see that the screen doesn't really get in the way of your viewing angle so you can still see everything and it's actually in a nice spot so it doesn't get in the way at all I don't mind having the screen here at all instead of the gauges and the Priuses have always had a funny looking gauge you know they've always tried to be different with the way that they display information in the past Priuses have had this entire gauge that just runs across the entire dashboard which I didn't really like but this right here I'm a pretty big fan if you configure it in a way that it only displays what you want to see because if you just leave it on its default settings there can be a lot of stuff going on here and it can be pretty confusing to look at and moving on to the steering wheel the steering wheel is super comfortable for lawn driving but I think that there are just way too many buttons on the steering wheel so when you first get in the car just like looking at the multi-information display it can be a little bit confusing because you have just so many steering wheel controls but as you start to drive you'll start to get familiar with the ones that you use the most often so you have your volume knob over here which you can just kind of tick it up and down just like this it does feel a little bit cheap but you can skip tracks over here rewind tracks and over here on the top right side this is where you're going to enter things like your radar cruise control and turn on your lane Trace assist the button over here kind of hides some of these menus from the multi-information display but there's just a lot of buttons in here this voice assistant button I don't even think I pressed it once the audio mode button I don't even think I pushed it once either the phone call button I can see how this could be useful but every time I've had a phone call it just shows up on Apple carplay and I just use the touch screen and it would be nice to see Toyota stop adding more buttons to the steering wheel I think we've added enough one of the other things over here by the steering wheel that some of you may have noticed is we have an eye tracker over here and so I'll talk about this a little bit more when I go over some of the safety features but right behind the steering wheel there's an eye tracker which with your permission will record your eyes and where they're looking now let's very briefly just go over these back seats over here so sitting into the back seat the back seats are not very wide at all so I feel like this would be great as a four-person setup but if you have somebody sitting in the middle seat everybody's going to be bumping shoulders and it's going to be very tight back here but leg room in the back seats is more than enough I'm about five feet and nine inches and I feel very comfortable sitting back here during my time driving the Prius Prime I didn't sit in the back at all so this is something that I'm seeing now for the first time but we actually have a 1500 watt power outlet down here which is a very nice touch and two USBC ports and let's take a look at the cargo space here as well so it is a hatchback we have no power liftgate unless you get the xse premium trim level this one right here is just the xse so if you lift it up manually just like that there's a little handle right here to close it and it also has this little privacy cover right here so you can see it sort of lifted up right now as we lifted up the hatch but as we shut it you can see It'll sort of go down like that and just hide from outside people the things that you have inside now it's not a ton of space back here I'll look it up online and see exactly how much cubic feet or cubic inches of space we have back here but it's really not a whole town you can see we have a weather floor mat back here I don't believe there's a spare tire I'd be surprised if there was yeah it looks like we just have a fix up black kit so no spare tire on the Prius Prime but as you can see right there not a whole ton of space one really cool touch though is that there is another power outlet over here so it's actually really cool to see that these power outlets are starting to become a more common thing that we're seeing in cars and the rear seats fold down super easily all you got to do is go back here push on this little latch and pull them forward super easy just like that foreign [Music] we're going to talk about some of the driver safety Technologies in the 2023 Prius Prime so the 2023 Prius Prime has Toyota safety Sense 3.0 which is now their latest and newest version of their Toyota safety sense Suite this is the first time that I've driven a car for an extended period of time that has had version 3.0 I've spent a lot of time behind the wheel in cars that have had 2.5 and 2.5 plus and 2.0 so I'm very familiar with previous versions of Toyota safety sense so it was kind of interesting for me to see how they've Incorporated some of their new features and improved on some of their older ones so in previous versions we've had six features Two Toyota safety Sense 3.0 adds a seventh feature so we're gonna go through each of the seven Toyota safety sense features and we're going to talk about how my experience has been with them so the first Toyota safety sense feature is the pre-collision system and so this is one that's probably been around the longest it's basically just here to apply the brakes for you in case you don't and it's just here to prevent a collision I think that and this isn't just a problem with 3.0 I've noticed this with 2.5 and 2.5 plus so this isn't a problem that's really just about the Prius it's about this whole Toyota safety sense pre-collision system thing it's a little bit too sensitive on narrow streets so there have been times in the last two three days when I've just been driving around the Prius Prime on a narrow Street and there's cars parked along the side and all of a sudden and all of a sudden the car displays break and a loud beeping noise is coming into the cabin because it thinks that I'm gonna hit one of the cars that are just parked along the side of this Narrow Street when I'm not and I'm clearly turning as well so this happens on narrow streets when you're turning the system freaks out and it thinks you're about to hit the car and it just warns you and sometimes it scares the out of you as well so pre-collision system it's great that we have it but I think it's a little bit too sensitive especially when you're driving along these like narrow streets when you're going 25 miles an hour the second the second Toyota safety sense system that we're going to talk about is the dynamic radar cruise control so this is the vehicle to vehicle distance control radar cruise control when you're on the highway and you're using your adaptive cruise control it'll slow down if the car in front of you slows down and it has a maximum speed that you've set just like setting regular cruise control this has been great and I use it all the time when I'm on the highways but the only real issue that I have is sometimes it doesn't slow the car down enough so like you'll see a traffic jam up ahead maybe like 10 cars in front of you okay so we're clearly about to slow down but the the car that's but the car that's directly in front of you might not be slowing down yet so you know as a human that can see 10 cars ahead of myself I can see okay I'm I should get ready I should probably start slowing down a little bit the system's not going to do that until the car in front of you does that and so there have been like two or three instances where I've had to sort of take control and press on the brake just because I'm like we're not slowing down fast enough you know like this is this is getting a little bit too close for comfort here but overall Dynamic radar cruise control it's a fantastic system and I use it like 99 of the time when I'm in any newer Toyota on the highway the third safety system is Lane depart alert with steering assist and this one I don't think has changed very much since the previous version 2.5 plus but if you're going over 30 miles an hour if you don't use your signal and you're trying to leave the lane the car is pretty much just going to bounce you back into your lane and you can sort of fight it so if you're really doing it intentionally it'll let you through into the other lane but if you're just kind of swerving away without using your signal it'll bounce you back in and keep you in your lane the fourth system of TSS 3.0 is going to be Lane Trace assist this is another fantastic feature this for me is up there with radar cruise control because it keeps you centered in your lane while you're using radar cruise control and you can't turn on LTA without first turning on radar cruise control so you turn both of those on and you can pretty much be hands off well not really you're not supposed to but you can take your hands off and the car will stay centered in your lane and it's going to keep the speed of the car in front of you so I'll show some POV driving clips of me doing this one thing about LTA is that it asks you to put your hand on the steering wheel about every 10 or 15 seconds and it can get a little bit annoying but I mean the car is pretty much driving itself for you so it wants to know that you're there and that you're being alert I thought that they might go away with this put your hand on the wheel thing especially because we have this new eye tracker over here behind the steering wheel but I guess not that only is going to work on the newest feature which we'll talk about in a second but this this eye tracker over here has a function and it's actually pretty cool the fifth safety feature is road sign assist again pretty much nothing new maybe it picks up on a couple of new signs now but roadside assist will display in the multi-information display what the speed limit is if there's a stop sign coming up if there's any yields pretty much any road signs that the camera picks up it'll just display on your multi-information display and it's useful one thing that I don't like about road sign assist especially in this newest version is if you're going even one mile per hour over the speed limit the speed limit that's on the multi-information display is just going to be highlighted in red and so oftentimes people are going 70 75 80 miles per hour on the highway even though the posted speed limit is 65 and that's just the flow of traffic on the highway and so pretty much anytime you're going to be driving on the highway the speed limit sign that says 65 is just going to be highlighted in Red so it would be cool if you know it didn't do that on the highways because on the highways realistically especially here in California nobody is doing 65 miles per hour the sixth safety sense feature that we're going to talk about is automatic high beams this is one that I didn't really use too often at all but it pretty much just turns on your high beams for you at night if there's no other cars or no other people around you as soon as it sees somebody or it sees headlights tail lights it turns off the high beams if it comes clear again it turns your high beams back on it just makes a little bit easier to see at night if there's nobody else around you it's something that most people especially if you live in a city you're only going to ever see turned on when you're going on like on-ramps and off ramps from a highway because generally especially at night those can stay pretty empty there's just less people on the highway and that's it it just turns on your hiding for you and turns them off when you don't need them anymore which you know it's cool to have but it's not a mind-blowing feature next up we're going to talk about the seventh Toyota safety sense feature which is the new feature this is proactive driving assist this is one that was completely new to me and I ended up really liking it because what it does is when you let off of the accelerator pedal as there's a car person bicyclist in front of you whatever it is the car will automatically slow down and this is not like regenerative braking because regenerative braking is like a constant force that's always being applied at the same level no matter what this is a little bit different because it's going to kind of react differently depending on how far away that object or person is in front of you and so it's sort of it sort of enables like one pedal driving up until you get to about like 10 miles an hour it's sort of just stops and you're gonna actually have to apply the brakes at that point I couldn't really find a lot of info online about this and like at what parameters it works and at what parameters it doesn't work but that's just kind of how I figured it out like it'll just it'll Slow Me Down the same way that the car in front of me is slowing down when I let off of the gas pedal until about 10 miles an hour and that's when I actually have to press the brakes pretty cool feature I think that they're going to improve on this one in future versions to a point where you don't even have to press the brakes at all if there's a car in front of you if they slow down you slow down so those are the seven features of Toyota safety Sense 3.0 but there's other safety features of this 2023 Prius Prime that aren't a part of Toyota safety sense so the first one is the safe exit assist and what this will do is let's just say you just parallel parked somewhere and you turn off the car you're about to get out if there's another car coming that's about to hit you or if there's a bicyclist coming from behind you it will shine the blind spot Monitor and it'll make a noise to just alert you that hey there's somebody behind you don't get out just yet um useful feature but it's only happened to me once and that's with a lot of parallel parking in San Francisco you know it's it's a useful thing to have but it happens a lot less than you might think another safety feature that this Prius Prime has is blind spot monitors which are standard and they work great the only kind of real complaint that I have is it takes a little bit too long for them to turn off so sometimes the lane will have already cleared or the car will have already passed me the lane is clear and the blind spot monitor is still is still going to be turned on for another second or two and so you know I could have already been moving over to that lane that I'm trying to get to but my blind spot monitor is still saying hey there's something over there and I look I do like a triple check and I'm like it's clear and and then it'll turn off so it's a little bit slow to turn off that indicator and having the indicator I've noticed is actually especially useful in this Prius just because this B pillar back here is really really wide so it sort of creates this blind spot it might just be in the way that I'm sitting here maybe if I set a little bit further back I could see a little bit better through this pillar but this is a huge blind spot in the Prius Prime and so having the blind spot monitors is really important the Prius primes also have rear cross traffic alert and front cross traffic layer the front cross is a new feature for this year here rear cross traffic clear is just like it was before when you are in Reverse if there's anything moving that's in view so if there's a car moving if there's a person Crossing it'll basically just alert you front cross trafficker is new and it's basically the same thing it'll show up in your multi-information display if you are moving from a stop sign or moving from a red light if you just start moving and there is a car Crossing in front of you or somebody walking even really far away the car will know and it'll just alert you that there's traffic Crossing in the front and I'll show a clip of what that looks like but it's a pretty useful feature this actually happens a lot more than you would think or that I would think and so I ended up seeing this front cross traffic alert a lot more than I thought that I would so you're actually gonna you're gonna end up seeing this alert a lot more than you think especially if you are the type to sort of creep up a little bit after a stop just to see if it's clear because sometimes things aren't fully clear so if you come to a complete stop and you roll up a little bit more just to get like a better better view of what's going on it'll let you know hey there's cars crossing it's like yeah I know but you know it's good to have it all of these safety features you can turn off if you don't like them the last safety feature that we're going to talk about is traffic jam assist and this is one that the Prius Prime has it's a new one as well and it's one that I found almost no information online so I pretty much just kind of drove around and I was like all right let's see what happens so traffic jam assist is full hands-free driving when you're in a traffic jam and this is a little bit different than using radar cruise control and LTA turned on at the same time because remember that would ask me to put my hand on the wheel every 15 seconds or so this is full hands-free driving and it was kind of hard for me to figure out how do I enable it but basically the two times that I've gotten it to work I was using radar cruise control and LTA on the highway and we hit a complete traffic jam after a few seconds it asked me if I wanted to use traffic jam assist so I use the arrows hit OK I said yes then it asks if it's okay to use the eye tracker and record my eyes so I said okay yes at that point it enters traffic jam assist and traffic jam assists from The Limited info that I found online it works up to 25 miles per hour and it's basically if you're in that stop and go traffic you're doing nothing but looking forward so the eye tracker is just making sure that you're staying alert and aware and you just do nothing and the car will do everything for you in a traffic jam up to 25 miles per hour if the car exceeds 25 miles per hour because you're in drcc plus LTA it just stops and it just resumes radar cruise control with Lane Trace assist so it's a nice feature to have it's one that I wish that I got to experience a little bit more but I didn't I didn't have enough traffic jams in my time you know I didn't have enough stop and go traffic on the highway during my time with the Prius Prime while we're still on the topic of driver assistance I wanted to quickly talk about this eye tracker a little bit because even if you're not using radar cruise control Lane Trace assist or traffic jam assist this eye tracker in the settings you can turn it on to still be looking at you and so I kept it on for the entire time that I've been driving the Prius Prime but every single time that I would look to the side or look away for even two seconds it would put an alert up on the multi-information display saying you know driver is not paying attention you know please look forward or sometimes if I would just slouch a little bit too much or put my hand in a way that's covering the eye tracker it would you know say please sit up straight and that got a little bit annoying it's something that I would probably turn off if I don't want to use traffic jam assist if you're going to be the type of person that's always sitting in stop and go traffic and you want to use traffic jam assist you're gonna have to have that eye tracker turned on but that could get a little bit annoying as a closing memo for this section talking about driver assistance I want to mention that all of these Safety Systems you can turn off in the settings so I know that there can be a lot of annoyances with a lot of these things you can turn off and turn on whichever ones you like whichever ones you don't like so you don't have to use all of the safety systems like I used when I was testing and driving around and trying to get a good impression of what this car is really like [Music] all right in this next section we're going to talk about the fuel economy and the charging of the Prius Prime so of course this is a plug-in hybrid so over here on the driver's side we have our gas lid and on the passenger side over here we have our charging port so to open up the gas lid you do have to go inside and just by the steering wheel you can just press right here on this little gas icon that'll pop this open and you can just fuel your Prius Prime at any gas station using 87 octane fuel then if we move over to the passenger side as long as the Prius Prime is unlocked you can just go ahead and tap right here and that'll open it up and you're going to go ahead and stick in your CCS connector over here now you do get a level one charger standard free included with the car so anytime you buy a Prius Prime they're going to give you a level one in the trunk that you can just plug into any old Outlet at home it'll take 11 hours to charge the car if you do that if you use something like a 240 so if you if you install one of these 240s at home or if you go to a public charger it'll charge the car in just about four hours so there's a couple of different ways that we can drive the Prius Prime over here at the very top of the multi-information display it'll let you know what mode you're in so right now I'm in EV mode and down here by the shifter you have this little switch right here where you can switch around between your different Drive modes so we have Auto which you can see now at the top it switches over to Auto and this will then automatically choose between driving and EV or driving in hybrid and it'll switch around for whichever one is most optimal for whatever you're doing and then the button just down below that you can manually switch between EV and HV so right here by just pressing the button I can go into hybrid mode that's HV mode right there it's just going to drive like a normal Prius in this mode and by pressing it again I can go into EV mode now down here you can see I have three miles of electric range right now so if I just stick to EV mode I'm only going to have about about three miles to go before it kicks me out and takes me into HV mode if you don't have your plug-in hybrid battery charged it's just always going to default into HV mode and it's not going to let you go into Auto or into EV mode now there's one other thing that you can do over here is if you want to drive in EV mode and you are not near any public Chargers or you can't charge at home what you can do is you can actually have the gas engine charge of the battery and so to do that you're just going to want to hold down on this button right here it's going to enter a new Mode called charge mode and now you can see the engine is going to kick in and what that's going to do is it's going to start to recharge that battery and this is going to be pretty slow in about like 10 minutes of driving I've just added three miles from zero and charge mode is going to be useless for 99 of use cases the only real use case that I can sort of think of for using charge mode is going to be say if you want to go camping and you want to make sure that by the time you arrive at your campsite and park your car for a week the battery is full so that you have power for the whole week for all your devices so maybe then you would put it into charge mode as you're driving up to your campsite and then you get there and it's full and you have a whole week of having a full battery to charge anything you want so I don't think people are going to be using charge mode very often if you have access to be plugging in your Prius on a regular basis I'd highly recommend sticking into auto mode because that's where you're going to get that 114 or 127 miles per gallon depending on which Prius Prime you have but if you are in HV mode this one in particular is rated for 48 miles per gallon I've been doing about 46 miles per gallon in my hybrid driving and that's mainly just because you know I can drive the scene more fuel efficiently but I've been having a lot of fun just kind of stepping on it and really trying to feel for the power of this Prius prime one last thing here is that if you do have a short commute you can actually just stick it in EV mode like this now we're in EV mode like this and if you have your battery at full 100 you can go 40 miles on this xse I think it's up to 44 miles if you get the SE model but if you have a short commute you can drive 10 miles to work 10 miles back maybe another 10 miles throughout the day for just miscellaneous Lanes go back home plug it in and you can never use gas you can just run this purely as an electric car if you have a short commute so that is something that would be really nice for a lot of people and then when you need to go somewhere a little bit further you can use Auto or you can just use hybrid mode and still have really high gas mileage let's talk a little bit about my charging experience so on the first night that I got the Prius Prime I went to the mall and I wanted to see what it's like to charge the car so there's three different parking garages in this mall and they each had charge Point Chargers which is just the one that I chose to use because I already have a charge Point account and there's so many different makers of these public Chargers it's kind of good to just stick to one you know there's so many different types there's Electrify America there's evgo there's charge point and those are kind of just some of the big ones I stuck to charge point just because there seems to be a lot of them in my area and I already have an account with them I didn't want to have five different apps just for charging the car so I'm trying to find this charge Point charger in this small parking garage they don't tell you exactly where it is so it could take you know a little bit of searching and going through their underground parking garage just trying to find where that charger is and most of the time public EV Chargers are going to be towards the front of a parking lot so kind of near the handicap spots they seem to be usually in the front there's only a few parking garages that I've seen where they like took them away all the way in the back but it took me under four hours to charge the car I was charging at about 40 cents per kilowatt and it came out to less than five dollars so the charging cost was very insignificant I got up to 40 miles of range and the first thing I did was I just went to EV mode because I just wanted to try it out and I pretty much just burned through all 40 of those miles just driving it really fast on the highway driving semi-aggressively just trying to see what it's like to drive this thing as an EV and it doesn't really Drive much different as an EV than it does as a hybrid you don't really notice too much of a difference in the way that it handles or anything like that but it was cool to you know not use any gas on my drive home from the mall and then some more driving after that as well what I probably should have just done is stuck it in auto mode and tried to see how many miles I can get out of that full charge by using a combination of EV and HV mode via auto mode there's two things that I wanted to say about the Chargers though that are in public now I only went to one mall and I've had one experience now charging the car but it took me three tries to find a charger that was actually working the first one that I went to it was just down and it took me a minute to find out that it was offline and so I went over just one parking spot over to the next one the second one I plugged it in and for some reason it just wouldn't click and after a couple tries I just gave up I moved one more spot down and the third one just worked just fine so it can be a little bit annoying at least right now in 2023 to find a reliable public charger I might do a separate video in the future where I you know go and test like 10 random public EV Chargers just kind of like what is what the state of public charging looks like in 2023 because it'll be interesting to see how the EV charging infrastructure improves in the future and the second thing that I wanted to talk about when it comes to public charging is the charge Point charger that I went to at the mall I realized in the chargepoint app that if you stay in the spot after the car has completed its charging and it's a full charge it's at full charge already it's not drawing any more power the station will actually charge you ten dollars per hour for just occupying that space and not disconnecting your car so it's important to have you know a good app or just a good eye on is my car charged you know or how how much my car is charged because you don't want to pay that extra 10 an hour just by sitting there and occupying the space if your car is already fully charged so if you so if you go out and buy one of the these Prius primes I would highly recommend charging at home it just makes sense you can do a level one charge at home just using any old Outlet via the cable that's provided in the trunk when you buy one of these and you know you can just plug it in overnight you get home from work park it in the garage plug it in you don't need to get the fancy level 2 Chargers that cost five six hundred bucks plus installation you know you can just charge it overnight and you're probably not if especially if you have a short commute you're probably not gonna use all of your range in one day and have to charge every single night especially if you're in auto mode so you know what I'm trying to say is you don't have to get a level two it is nice to have I don't have one myself so I couldn't charge at home and I see a lot of people who get these and get you know electric cars with an electric car you might need it a bit more but you know I see a lot of people that get plug-in hybrids and the first thing on their shopping list is going to be you know a level two charger to install in the garage or right outside the garage you don't necessarily need it it's going to take 11 hours to charge this car and every single day for roughly 11 hours your car is probably going to be sitting at home anyways so if you do want that faster charging I'll leave a link in the description where you guys can purchase one via Amazon it's going to be an affiliate link so you know if you guys are looking for a charger to install at home a level two if you guys want to purchase it through my link I'll find a good one to recommend to you guys and that would also help me out a lot foreign so in this next section we're going to talk about cost and availability so this particular xse trim level starts at 35 600 that's before all options destination pretty much anything the base price for an xse is 35 600 now this one right here has that larger 12.3 inch display this one also came with the rubber floor mats and it has that 425 dollar special paint so you add all those things together you add the destination fee this one here has an MSRP of thirty eight thousand one hundred fifty four dollars which is a pretty affordable price it's not much more than the standard Prius and so for me I would highly recommend the prime over the regular Prius it almost doesn't make sense to get the regular Prius the regular Prius isn't much less expensive but even if you're somebody who doesn't have the ability to charge all the time it's still good to have it because you never know if you're you know out in public you can just plug in and it's very cheap to just plug get in charge of the car especially because charging infrastructure is going to improve in the next couple years rapidly because everybody's adopting electric vehicles charging is going to get a lot a lot easier in the coming years now as far as availability goes these things just came out I don't think I've seen another one on the road just yet so it's going to be interesting to look back at this video in even just a couple of months or a year or two because these things are probably going to be everywhere with how popular they are right now online but these things are super hard to find one thing that I can say is if you want to avoid paying too much you're going to need a little bit of patience but if you just wait around you'll find one without you know paying more than the MSRP and as far as as far as how I got this Prius prime it wasn't given to me for free or anything like that I actually rented it out I saw that it was available and I hadn't had the opportunity to make a video on a Prius Prime yet so I saw the opportunity to rent it out and I said let's do it while we're on the discussion of costs one thing that I wanted to kind of just nap in math calculate is about how much would somebody spend to fuel the scene in a year and compare that to the average car so I've got some numbers over here if you're driving the average 12 000 miles per year and you're paying about four dollars a gallon for gas at 114 miles per gallon which is what this one is rated for you should spend less than 500 per year on fuel and if you compare that to a car that gets 30 miles per gallon that's not a hybrid not a plug-in just a regular car that gets 30 miles per gallon that comes out to about 1600 per year so getting a Prius Prime like this that gets 114 miles per gallon would save the average person about a thousand dollars a year and that's assuming that you're driving a car currently that gets 30 miles per gallon which is pretty good for just a non-hybrid non-electric non-plug-in car as far as incentives go this Prius Prime has no federal tax credits which is a little bit different than the previous generation Prius Prime which did have I think it was a 4 500 federal tax credit when that one was being sold but late last year they changed the restrictions around a little bit and now the car has to be made in the USA all of Toyota's Prius Prime's at the moment are made in Japan so they don't qualify for a federal tax credit but you may be able to get some sort of rebate or credit from your state I know California state does some sort of clean air rebate and things like that so there are ways to still save money on your purchase after the purchase through your state programs and to wrap up the cost segment of this video I wanted to say two more things firstly is if you want to hyper-mile this car and you want to really maximize getting as much possible miles per gallon out of your Prius Prime and you don't want the base model maybe consider getting the smaller wheels so these are 19 inch wheels on the xsc and the xse premium but the SC has 17 inch wheels and the wheel and tire combination is probably one of the most important things when it comes to saving gas mileage so it is possible to get the SE wheels and tires and put them on your xse or xse premium if you're really into maximizing your MPG you could probably consider finding you know on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist people that are getting rid of their stock wheels from an Su model because they want to upgrade to a fancier one you can probably pick those up cheap and put them on your xse or xse premium and get better gas mileage the second thing is being that this is a Toyota Most states are going to offer Toyota care so that's two years or 25 000 miles of free maintenance and roadside assistance don't forget that there's surprisingly a lot of people that don't know that when you buy a new Toyota in Most states I think it's in 48 states you get 2 years 25 000 miles free maintenance or roadside assistance so it's attached to your VIN number you can go to any dealership your first two oil changes are free the oil changes on this Prius Prime are due every 10 000 miles um if you're getting one of these it's your own personal car do your oil changes every 5 000 miles that's just what I would personally recommend you know and things that I've heard from Toyota mechanics I'll leave also another Link in the description to a video by The Car Care Net he is a Toyota mechanic and he has videos tearing down engines and talking about you know what kind of damage doing a 10 000 mile oil change versus a 5 000 mile oil change can do over the lifespan of an engine as it starts to approach like 200 000 miles so oil changes are cheap I would personally do them every 5000 miles instead of 10 000 miles just to avoid having any issues down the line especially if you plan on keeping the car for a long time so those are my thoughts on the 2023 Prius Prime this video has probably been a little bit longer than my usual videos where I just go over the exterior interior I'm actually about to record the overview video for the Prius Prime which you guys can also check out on my channel as well um I'm a big fan of this car it's a little bit too small for my liking but it handles well it's got plenty of power the gas mileage is great for myself I would consider a plug-in hybrid or an electric car as my next car just because you know that's less money that you have to spend on fuel so when it comes time for me to upgrade to my next car a plug-in or an electric or up there for things that I'm considering for me personally this car is a little bit too small I've felt very tight in this interior especially in this driver's seat here over the last few days but for somebody that just isn't looking for a huge car or you know they're cool with having a smaller car they're used to driving something like a Corolla or they've had a Prius in the past I really feel like this is a fantastic car I also want to emphasize very quick before we end the video If you enjoyed it please give it a thumbs up and subscribe I am my own sponsor I'm not you know including like a three minute sponsor break and taking a bunch of money from a sponsor so if you guys enjoy this type of video and you want to see more opinionated content from me where I talk about my experience with the car rather than just talking about you know this is what's outside this is what's inside then really show some support on this video and I'll do more videos like this with other cars and I'll drive them long distances and we'll do you know more videos like this where I'm just talking about my feelings about a car and what I think about it so thank you guys so much for watching this video and check out the links in the description please show support if you enjoyed this video and if you think that there are some things that I can change because this is a first video of a new format that I'm doing if there are changes that you'd like to recommend I always welcome them feel free to leave them down in the comments below and we'll see you all next time [Music] thank you foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you

Channel: Krowicki

Views: 123,705

Keywords: 2023 toyota prius prime, toyota prius prime 2023, 2023 toyota prius, 2023 prius, 2023 prius prime, 2023 toyota prius prime redesign, toyota prius 2023, prius prime, toyota prius prime, 2023 toyota prius prime review, 2023 toyota prius review, prius prime 2023, 2023 toyota prius interior, 2023 toyota prius hybrid, prius 2023, prius, toyota prius, toyota prius 2023 review, toyota prius prime 2023 review, 2023 toyota prius prime plug-in hybrid

Id: n_4brc6LeAg

Length: 60min 36sec (3636 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 10 2023