2016 owners, do you wish you had waited for prime?

I was in the purchase process for a 2016 P4 but will now wait for the Prime. My 06 P4 at 210K+ will carry me till then.

 

This is intensely interesting to me, as I believe this is the first post I've read from a future Prime buyer. Bear with me, I have a few questions.

- What decided you on halting your Gen4 LB purchase to buy the Prime? Was it styling, premium features, plug-in capability?

- Would you consider a GM product, or are you a brand-loyal Toyota customer, i.e., is the Volt even an option you would consider?
--- If you do consider the Volt a viable option, what did you prefer about the Prime?

- Is a full BEV a practical option for you, i.e., did you consider the upcoming Chevy Bolt or Tesla Model III?

- What price would discourage you from buying a Prime (i.e., how much is too much)? $32k? $35k? $40k? Even more?

Just curious - I'm trying to understand what the Prime's prospects are likely to be. As you may have noted from previous posts, I'm a skeptic, but input from someone who's made the decision to buy would be very interesting. Thanks!

 

just for more perspective, i would consider a volt, now that prime has 4 seats and less cargo space. of course, that's on paper. i would have to drive them, sit in the back, get my best pricing, etc. yes, gm rep goes against it, and for me, i don't need more than 22 miles ev, since my pip is 66% ev already, with 11 miles. and i do like the 60 - 70 mpg for the other 33%.

 

That's an interesting way of putting it, since I think a PHEV that runs 1/3 of the time on gasoline probably DOES need more EV range. Gen1 Volt owners report ~75% EV operation on average (so many are getting more like 90%), and the Gen2 significantly increases AER. The MPG for the non-EV miles becomes less important when there are a lot fewer of them. The exact ratios depend on use cases, but I think that the Prime's AER improvements vs. the Volt's make for a fairly minor gain in that department, while the configuration changes (loss of middle rear seat and compromised trunk in the Prime, apparently just the opposite for the Gen2 Volt) sacrifice the PiP's biggest advantages over the Gen1 Volt.

I really should make clear, if I'd insisted on a plug-in (as noted, I didn't because I already have a BEV for myself, both reducing the need for a 2nd plug-in and complicating charging logistics for two cars), my wife would probably have insisted on the Prime regardless. Beyond the fact that the Prime's AER is actually sufficient to handle 90% of her driving (maybe more if you factor in between-errand charging at home), she's much the Toyota bigot, not overly price-sensitive, and we have a Toyota dealership in our backyard (along with M-B, Porsche/Audi, Volvo, and Lincoln, none of which tempt - when I say I'd have bought an iQ EV if Toyota/Scion sold it, that's why), putting Chevy at a huge disadvantage in this household. So that would be my story - I'm interested in others.

 

i don't know if there's an ideal percentage. at some point, you're driving an extended range ev i guess, but i don't see the point to having a hybrid system as efficient as prius, and driving mostly in ev. but some people might consider 67% too much, if you look at it from a efficiency point of view.

then again, with a 200 mile bev, i might not ever need a gas engine.

might be the start of an interesting thread.

 

With the exception of infrequent road trips, 90% of our driving is into the city to do our shopping and a 20 mile range is perfect. I am trying to minimize the amount of carbon dioxide with which I burden the planet. I would love to make those trips without utilizing the ice. And I love the ice efficiency of the Prius for longer trips. The heat pump in the Prime and the teaming of the electric motors for increased torque are two important new features. The car also has a host of other engineering advancements it inherits from the gen.4. There are really too many improvements to list and that is a very good thing. I think that it may have less wind resistance than the gen.4. There are a lot of the car's details yet to be revealed. I like the looks, both inside and out. The car is insurance for the inevitable return of higher fuel prices. Our electricity in the Pacific Northwest is relatively cleanly generated and will only get more so with time. It makes perfect sense for us.

Seating for 4, lack of a spare and reduced cargo capacity aren't important for us.

I will test drive the Volt, but probably won't get one. I know it is a failing on my part, but I am prejudiced against GM. I don't even like the Chevy emblem. I have thought that if I ever got a Volt, I would have it removed. I can't believe I am that closed minded, but there it is.

The Ioniq looks more conventional and much less sophisticated than the Prime. Just compare the look of the engine compartments of the two cars. I take Hyundai's performance claims with a great deal of scepticism.

Unless there is some unpleasant surprise for us when the Prime is available locally for a test drive, we will most probably be getting one. I expect the price will be around $35000.

Waiting is hard, though.

 

I'll note that I don't own any of the cars in question, but at this point am leaning towards a Gen 4 over the Prime. I live in an apartment, and I'm not actually sure my landlord would let me plug it in. Handling will be better for the Gen 4 due to lower center of gravity and lower polar moment of inertia. And, finally, Toyota's approach to packaging the battery in the Prime really bothers me - if they were going to make it a 4 seater, they could've packaged it lower and more centralized than they did, which would've made the cargo area more useful.

That said, I went absolutely went into this cross shopping the Volt and Prime (but, after test driving a Volt and a Gen 4, I found the Gen 4 to be vastly better to drive despite the Volt having more favorable power delivery). My AER requirements are well within the Prime's capability (10 mile round trip commute) - they'd even be within the PiP's capability if it weren't for the performance restrictions, and the range degradation in cold weather.

Personally, I classify vehicles like this:

Weak PHEV: Has a plug, but requires ICE in some normal driving situations due to power requirements or maximum speed requirements (see PiP, Ioniq plug-in)
Strong PHEV: Has a plug, can be driven in normal driving situations without ICE, but with performance degradation in EV mode (2016 ELR on the high end, A3 e-tron on the low end)
EREV: Full performance in EV mode (Volt)
BEVx/REx: Full performance in EV mode, with severely degraded performance in ICE mode (i3 REx)

In that classification, the Prime's somewhere between strong PHEV and EREV (top speed is limited, but performance otherwise actually appears to be stronger in EV mode).

It will be interesting to see the papers on its transmission - a one-way clutch, rather than a clutch that's engaged or disengaged, may mean that transitioning from CD to CS mode at speed may not be as smooth as the Gen 4 in some situations (as MG1 will no longer be able to spin at less negative RPM, it'll have to spin at positive RPM, to start the engine, which means the engine suddenly spins at whatever the MG1 positive RPM point for that MG2 speed is, and then has to apply torque to drop MG1 back down to negative RPM if that's what's appropriate). I'm actually kinda tempted to build new simulators of the various revisions of power split device (instead of what's out there, which is a NHW10 simulator in Java, and I believe a P112 (so NHW20) simulator in Flash), because of all the things going on in them now, and the different variations on them...

Oh, and it's also worth noting, despite the Prime's simpler gearbox (only a 1-mode EVT, not the 2-mode EVT that the Volt has) and larger engine, Toyota's claiming 120+ MPGe (the only thing that beats it is the i3 BEV, and it may not depending on final results) versus the Volt's 106 MPGe, and they're claiming similar fuel economy in CS mode to the Liftback (so ~52 MPG) versus the Volt's 42 MPG. Blowing almost every EV and EREV away in MPGe when in CD mode, while in all likelihood having more torque and power than in CS mode, doesn't strike me as a compliance car, or something that solely exists to make the ICE more efficient.

 

At a certain point, if % EV operation in a PHEV is high enough, a full BEV makes more sense for a lot of people. Most households that can afford a PHEV can afford or already have two vehicles. So one BEV or BEV + non-BEV may work out better for many than high AER PHEV.

Certainly there are those who have only one vehicle and limited charging options and other purchasing factors...

 

I remain skeptical on this point, but it depends on use cases, as always. Absent a national commitment to maintain a network of Superchargers along all major routes, with enough chargers per location to handle a growing fleet, long distance travel remains a challenge. In fairness, I must always remind myself that if longish road trips are just a once/twice a year thing, renting an ICEV is a perfectly reasonable supplement.

But with most households hosting at least two cars, there are some very good reasons that they should consider making one of them a BEV. The significance of the 200mi BEV isn't taking 150 mile trips, but having sufficient energy on-board to maintain accessories and cabin heating through longish commutes in cold weather. I still think a better solution for winter climes is a smaller battery and kerosene or diesel heaters (fuel being better for heating, electricity for propulsion). I appreciate the un-greenishness of such a suggestion may make it a non-starter for the present EV market, but a wider market might consider it a practical alternative until we can figure out something better. And no, heat pumps are NOT the answer - they're not worth a damn when it's 20F, and there's plenty of the country that sees those temperatures on morning commutes.

Shall I say that makes you rather special?

There it is indeed. Not complaining, as I have a similar issue in my household, but I think this just reinforces my expectation that most Prime buyers will be Toyota loyalists.

While they turn in comparable hwy mpg, P2 systems have some disadvantages around town, but smart engineering has narrowed the gap considerably (to around 10% from what I've heard), and a drivetrain that's 30% cheaper (eliminating one whole MG is huge) has some serious marketing advantages. Hyundai has taken a smart course for their purposes, pursuing a "solid silver" technology instead of stretching for the gold. I think there's a market for useful vehicles with good fuel economy that aren't the absolute best in class but offer much-reduced up-front costs. We'll see how performance holds up in the real world - the current Hyundai Sonata Hybrid should be a good first read on this generation's P2 performance in real world vs. EPA testing.

This is a very interesting observation, and the first time I've read this opinion expressed. The Volt has always been regarded as providing a superior driving experience to its Cruze siblings, but the above suggests that the Gen4 Prius may have raised the bar further than I'd realized. I'll be interested to see if we hear this from other sources as well. This might bode well for the Prime if the price isn't too far out of line, extending the audience beyond the Toyota loyalists mentioned above.

CD/CS mode sounds like Volt talk - watch that stuff! Anyway, this is really speculative - we're going to have to wait for hands-on reviews of production cars to see how well the Prius engineers have managed this. The Gen4 itself has really impressed me so far (as it has you judging from the above), so I'm willing to withhold judgment until then.

I don't think anyone's suggested the Prime is a compliance car - unlike the PiP, it's going to be sold everywhere. HSD, on the other hand, is definitely a system designed solely to improve ICE efficiency. The Prime uses a tweaked HSD by all accounts (the dual MG propulsion being the most notable feature), but this is about modifying what they have to address a perceived market niche, not evidence of a commitment to EV tech. To me the proof in the pudding is the limited AER and the utility compromises, proving that this was an add-on project, not engineered in from the outset.

For whatever reason Toyota is culturally resistant to EVs, and much as I'd like to think it's mainly about waiting for the tech to make economic sense, the spectacle of the Mirai fantasy suggests something more deeply wrong over there. I still think Toyota's been betting wrong on this and will wind up holding an empty bag if/when carbon taxes slam in worldwide, but again, all pretty speculative at this point.

 

No

The prime is not the car for me.

I travel on a daily basis 66 miles.

An overnight charge would get me 20, and then for 46 miles I'll have to carry around a big empty battery.

And for the longer trips, carrying around a big empty battery doesn't appeal to me.

jp

 

The nasty thing with the hydrogen focus is that the Japanese government has bought into that as their primary long-term energy plan, too. Not having paid that much attention to the politics of that situation, though, I'm not sure whether that's driving Toyota's focus on hydrogen, or whether it's the other way around and Toyota's (and Honda's) focus on hydrogen is driving Japanese policy through regulatory capture.

In any case, I could see why Gen 3 Prius buyers would find the Volt's handling to be OK, but I found the suspension tuning to be literally nauseatingly bad - I was literally getting motion sickness from the body pitching and rolling on a straight, but rough, road, and cornering was uninspiring. The Gen 4 I drove, however, was planted and controlled - not exactly inspiring in cornering (I mean, I'm used to a Miata here), but perfectly fine. And, while the Volt had more steering weight (which I liked), it had a slower rack, which I personally dislike, and the Gen 4 had enough steering feel on-center that it didn't feel vague, just light.

Interestingly, I did see a review somewhere where they came to the conclusion that the Prius was more nimble than the Volt (I very much agree), but they felt that the Volt was more planted (I disagree), and preferred the Volt due to its power delivery.

 

Just to play devil's advocate, that could still be a good use case depending on the circumstances. I contemplated a Volt when it was being proposed (final version Gen1 had not yet been revealed) and I had a similar daily round-trip (over 60 miles). It was about 5 miles from my house to the freeway, a bit over 20 miles of 60-65 mph freeway driving, then a bit less than 5 miles from the freeway into town to get to the office. A Prime could actually do that round trip pretty efficiently, operating as a BEV for the city/town roads and switching to hybrid/preserve for the freeway driving. It's more efficient on the freeway than the Gen2 Volt as a hybrid, and it's more efficient as a BEV for those limited "city" miles. In cold weather, if I could pre-heat the cabin before leaving home, the heat pump should be more than sufficient to maintain a warm cabin for a few miles until the ICE waste heat was available on the freeway (my start would obviously be a little chillier on the return trip). With limited AER, the key is to use each energy source where it's most efficient, not just take it on to the freeway in EV mode and quickly run out the battery, leaving it to run as a hybrid hauling a dead battery the rest of the trip.

 

For what it's worth, assuming 52 mpg and 22 mi AER for the Prime, 42 mpg and 53 mi AER for the Volt, the same amount of gasoline will have been used at 183.2 mi.

If you're not going as far as that, the Volt will win in gasoline efficiency (carbon footprint will require knowledge of your local grid's carbon footprint). If you're going further than that, the Prime will win.

 

Sure. I wasn't comparing the Prime to a Volt, just saying its AER wasn't useless in the described scenario. But that does bring it all back to my recurring bottom line - the price tag on the Prime. For non-Toyotistas, how many green car shoppers will find it to have a real advantage over the Volt? I'm not saying there won't be any - just that to me it looks like a slice of a niche, and that doesn't seem likely to translate into numbers. I'm not sure if Toyota cares or not - failure of the Prime might just be fodder for their "buyers don't want EVs, just more efficient ICEVs" argument.

If it turns out the Prime is a better driver's car than the Volt, that might add to the niche, but not by all that much. As you've noted before, this isn't really the key competitive metric, when all fall far short of, say, a Miata .

 

I think the black grille is extraordinarily ugly - but it might look all right if the rest of the car is also black.

 

It isn't actually black.

It's a smoke translucent plastic with a pattern underneath.

 

I think I saw a Lexus with a similar grille and the recessed headlights.

 

I agree, but I think the grille will get sun faded very easily overtime (like the plastic bottom pieces of my 2005). Then, you'll have a grey piece of grille plastic. It'll look terrible on a black car with the grill having a lighter color than the rest of the car.

 

Do you like the HUD?