Prime or regular Hybrid?

Get the Prime....you'll love EV mode and it will likely cover one leg of your commute. If you have L2 charging at work that'll be ~ $2 to charge, You may find a way to charge in the vi city of home. The Fed tax credit may make it cheaper than a regular Prius.

 

Engine would definitely starts less with bigger battery pack, especially when you run AC with heavy traffic.

 

it's all about the person doing the driving. if you DRIVE it like a prius is supposed to be driven you can get much better than the 50. I've got 24K miles on mine and am doing a 56MPG average, and that's a lot of very long distance driving without any battery.

if you're driving perfectly flat roads and a regular prius will probably win out, but you have to really drive it prius like. the prime gives you the opportunity to not have to start a stop a half mile back in order to get all the regen you can... the bigger battery allows the prime to soak up a lot more energy so you can break later and longer and not have to resort to breaking. As well, the upper limit on the amount of energy you can regen is vastly increased.

i'm sure you can pick a route that will due worse, but from my experience it's I get much better mileage than my Gen 3 (dont' have a regular gen 4 to compare it to).

 

I have a general 3 too, and a Prime. Comparing to it is apples and oranges. Gen 4 gets better mileage.

How often did you see your battery indicator topped out in the Gen 3? For me, it wasn't that often and only on long downgrades, and I live in California where there are mountains as well as hills. The regular Prius can capture just as much regen energy as the Prime until the battery is topped out, which is a rare event. Same electric motors in both cars. Carrying around an extra 300 pounds of weight has an energy cost. That's a lot of weight, like almost two extra people you're hauling around all the time. It takes more energy to accelerate that extra 300 pounds up to speed or push it up a grade, and it's impossible to recover all that energy on the downside because some always gets lost in friction and heat. There is no getting around that. The laws of physics apply. Plus, overall, all trips ultimately end at your home, so the overall elevation gain is the same as the loss, so in the end it evens out. You may gain on a drive that has more descending than climbing, but you will lose in the opposite.

I have a Prime and like it, but I have solar and plug my car in often so it's economical. But if I was like the OP and couldn't plug the car in at home, or paid for charging at work where buying gasoline would be the cheaper alternative, I wouldn't have bought the Prime. Toyota pretty much optimized the size of the liftback battery for hybrid mode and the liftback fits 5 passengers instead of 4, has more luggage space, a spare tire, accelerates faster and gets better gas mileage in hybrid mode. If plugging in doesn't make sense or is impractical, the liftback is the better hybrid (disregarding purchase price, where the Prime could be less expensive with tax credits and rebates, or carpool lane decals).

I wonder what responses the OP would have gotten if he asked his questions in the liftback forum?

 

It really depends on your driving profile. If you drive 100 miles a day, the difference between the two drops off quickly. In my case my drive to work is 12 miles. Guess how often the ICE is even turning on. The Prime makes huge sense for me. Overall, my average MPG ends up being around 250 MPG due to the high EV / ICE ratio.

 

OP says he drives 62 miles per day. And unable to charge . Or to be more specific, he can't charge at home but he can charge at work for $1 per hour. However the question was raised is the work charger L2 or not but that has not yet been clarified.