(Pretty) Prius Prime 1-year review

The one-year anniversary of buying my 2023 Prius Prime was rather unceremoniously announced by a nag screen on the infotainment display. My free mapping trial expired. Toyota really should work on their customer experience efforts! This is a long review posted in parts.

With that, I figured it would be a good time for a 1-year perspective on the car. Given the new looks, my wife dubbed it the “Pretty Prius Prime”, but since details matter on this website it is the PPPXP or Pretty Prius Prime, XSE Premium. Spoiler alert: while I’m going to cover positives and negatives, overall I am extremely happy with the car. It replaced my 2003 Gen1 Prius (still running, I gave it to a nephew), so a 20-year leap forward in car tech for me and a 9-year leap forward compared to my wife’s 2014 Gen3 Prius V.

 

SOME BASIC USAGE STATS FOR THE YEAR:

I’m a few miles short of 15,000 miles including two major road trips. One 5,200 miles (full report: https://priuschat.com/threads/prius-prime-5200-mile-road-trip-notes.245222) and one 2,700 miles for the eclipse. We had a third 8,000-mile trip planned for earlier this year, but alas postponed due to needing to care for an elderly family member. I’ve bought just over 200 gallons of fuel the past year and logged just under 1,000 KWh of charging. The electricity logging is a bit low given I’ve charged a few times away from home and I’ve had a few power failures at home that reset my kill-a-watt logging mid-month. Still, I bet those missed charges are less than 5% of the total. The percentage of gas is high mainly because of the road trips where access to overnight charging has been pretty scarce. For around town I am 99% electric, my longest distance between refuelings has been 1825 miles where we didn’t leave town for a few months.

I’ve had three oil changes so far, the first two were just after the break-in period before the 5,200 mile trip, and the second right after the trip. Those were the free ones at the dealer and yep, not going back voluntarily, those experiences along with the keyfob installation and battery issue were all pretty bad. The third was at my favorite local independent place and was good as always, they teased my about my Gen1 and now oogle over the Gen5. I admonish them—NO JOY RIDES!! There are lots of spirited discussions on how often to change oil, I’m settling in on 5K miles.

My “full” gasoline DTE has ranged from 415 miles (dead of winter) to 490 (summer). The plains in front of the Colorado front range aren’t exactly flat, so my EV range varies considerably when leaving town, generally 35-ish heading south and uphill, to reliably 50-ish if heading north and downhill. Around town with just round trips (no net altitude change) I’m getting 50-ish miles is pretty easily. My max is 57 miles. My last “full” EV range was 47 miles. I do not consider myself a hyper-miler, just a conservative driver. Based on refueling logs and extrapolating to a 0 DTE, it looks like there is at least a 1 gallon buffer beyond 0 DTE using Toyota’s specified tank capacity. How much capacity there is above that specified amount isn’t something I plan on testing!

 

PHEV USEFULNESS:

I’ve been wanting a Prius Prime since they were introduced and have not been disappointed. I very much like the idea of being pure electric around town, but still being able to go on long (and remote) road trips without any concerns about being stranded. I think this is best summed up in the “miles per hour” charging rate used by EVs. At home on 110V the PPPXP has a very slow charging rate of 4MPH (40 miles in 10 hours). Not a big deal since that is enough to fully charge overnight. On road trips the PPPXPs charging rate is about 10,00MPH (500 miles in 3 mins)!! No EV can come close to that! While not exhaustive, it looks like the DC Fast Charge places may offer 90-500MPH charging rates depending on way too many variables. I still want my car to have more stamina than me—especially on very long road trips.

On the need for a level 2 charger at home, I didn’t feel it made sense when buying the car and a year later that has turned out to be true. I can get a full charge overnight, so unless my errands for the day are over 40 (well, closer to 50) miles, charging speed is irrelevant. Even if over 50 miles in a day, it would have to be two sets of errands with some charging time in between for a level 2 charger to have any value over level 1. In the year I’ve had the car, I can only recall that happening twice. Both were morning errands then leaving town in the afternoon so I didn’t get my full EV range before going to gas on the out-of-town trip.

 

CHARGING ON ROAD TRIPS:

This hasn’t been very practical and luckily doesn’t really matter. The car charges so slowly (even on level 2) that the only practical charging is overnight, so it has to be an outlet at the hotel. Sitting with the car for 4 hours to get 30 minutes of electric driving makes no sense. While I am sure it will get better over time, my success rate at being able to charge overnight at a hotel is maybe 25%. For road trips I assume it will be gas and if I’m lucky and able to charge at the hotel, consider those a few extra “free” miles.

COST (PHEV vs HEV):

From a pure economic sense, I’m not sure the PPPXP is better than a regular Prius. The regular Prius is so efficient on gas that even if 80% of your driving is electric, the savings on using cheaper electricity vs fuel will take forever to make up for the purchase price difference. This YouTube video seemed to explain it best (

). There isn’t any US federal credit for the PPPXP, but I did get a modest state credit, so that helps a bit with the math. While gas and electricity prices vary, when I last did the math with gas at $3.75 and my variable electricity cost of $0.13/KWh, the cost per mile of electricity is about half of gasoline. Math aside, I do like zipping around town on pure electric a LOT, so even if the math is a bit iffy, the cool factor is real.

 

FUN VS ECONOMY:

I didn’t fully anticipate this before getting the car, but I do now. Up until the Gen5, the decision between fun (sporty) vs economy was made at purchase time. Get a lower MPG “fun” car with some pep versus a Prius (or any of the other HEVs) that was a fuel sipper. Once purchased, you are committed to that decision. I had no problem with that, and economy has been the priority when I’ve had to choose. The nice part about the PPPXP is that now that decision between fun vs economy can essentially be revisited at every stoplight! Drive the Prius “like a Prius” and you are going to easily get great Prius-like economy and I do that 99% of the time. It is just nice every once in a while to have some fun and purposely get a “terrible ECO score”. That is only on rare occasions so overall I’m still getting the economies the Prius is famous for. After 20 years of having maybe 100HP with the Gen1, occasionally requesting and getting all 220HP is pretty cool and occasionally a bit scary. Heck, even getting around “160HP” on pure electric is impressive compared to my Gen1. This isn’t nearly as much as most pure EVs, but has none of the EV downsides.

 

THE 12V BATTERY ISSUE:

I didn’t escape this issue. In my case, however, it was partially self-inflicted. I have a ham radio installed (Installing a 2-meter ham radio in the Gen5 | PriusChat)

that is tied directly to the battery. I did leave the radio on for a few days without realizing it and drained the battery severely. Hence not really able to claim the battery was bad when I abused it. It doesn’t charge well and I’m living with for now but will replace it before the next major road trip.

The weirder issue though is that when the battery is severely drained, the jumper tabs under the hood don’t connect to the battery! Connecting jumper cables there had no effect! I was in the process of figuring out how to get the car towed to the dealership when on a lark I decided to instead try jumping directly to the battery—not an easy feat when all the locks are electric. That worked! I suspect there is some kind of low voltage lockout between the battery and the box in the engine compartment. Generally seems a good idea, but since that is the jumper location too, means the jumper location gets disabled the one time you really need it!!! When I pressed a dealership manager on this, he insisted I didn’t connect to the tabs correctly. An actual technician informally confirmed he has had similar issues and jumps the battery directly too.

 

AS A ROAD TRIP CAR:

While not a luxury car, compared to our Gen1 and Gen3 the PPPXP is still a huge step up in comfort, luxury, and driver assistance features. We have lots of road trips planned and so this was important and the PPPXP is a great road trip car. Not perfect, but great. The big disappointments for us are well documented and accurate: less luggage space and missing the reassurance of having a spare tire. Luggage space is especially true for road trips where you’d like keep yout stuff under the cargo cover.

Rather than repeat a lot, if you haven’t looked at my 5,200 mile road trip report linked at the top, go look there.

 

DRIVER ASSISTANCE/SAFETY FEATURES:

This is a long list and only a few are new/unique to the Gen5, so will be as brief as possible. Again, this is perspective after having the car a year:

DRCC (Dynamic Radar Cruise Control) and LTA (Lane Tracing Assist): Wow, for me these are game-changers in driving workload. I kinda knew they would be so had very high expectations, and they were met and exceeded. For long distance driving they are great. They handle pretty challenging conditions much better than I expected. It is pretty amazing to see how good it is at looking only at cars in our lane even when the road is curvy. It also does an amazing job on rural two-lane roads where the only references are a faded centerline and dirt/grass road edge. Fun post here about not having it for one trip (DRCC, LKA: Already spoiled! | PriusChat)

LCA (Lane Change Assist): Works as advertised (once I figured it out), but pretty much useless in that it takes as much attention and effort to use the feature than just changing lanes manually.

LDA (Lane Departure Alert): Never actively use it since I use LTA instead for long haul driving. It occasionally tries to nudge me when I cross dotted lines on merge lanes a bit before they end. Not annoying enough to disable it though.

PDA (Proactive Driving Assist): Warming up to it after thinking it was pretty useless. See this post for more detail: PDA (Proactive Driving Assist) may be better than I thought | PriusChat

FCTA (Front Cross Traffic Alert): Great feature, but the default settings are too sensitive. I should be able to let my foot off the brake at an intersection shortly after the crossing car starts moving. The PPPXP suggests that’s a bad idea. I think I can change this, just haven’t tried yet. It’s legitimately warned me a few times, mostly when the thick A-pillar obscures something.

RSA (Road Sign Assist): Pretty cool, surprisingly accurate for speed signs mostly, but of limited usefulness. It is most useful in construction zones when the GPS database is showing non-construction speeds. The only place it reliably gets confused is speed signs on frontage roads when you are on the highway. Outside speed limit signs, I’ve only ever seen it note a stop sign and there it only has about a 50/50 success rate and it doesn’t complain if I do a rolling stop, so not really a safety feature.

Cruise Control (Not DRCC): Tinkered with it, but never had a reason to want it over DRCC.

TJA (Traffic Jam Assist): This was the surprise feature that was a LOT more useful than I expected. It does an amazing job of reducing stress and workload in a traffic jam. Regrettably, it requires the navigation subscription to work, see SUBSCRIPTIONS later. I do monitor it closely and so far it’s handled some of the most bone-headed maneuvers by other traffic jammed drivers. I’m impressed and slowly getting to trust it more and more.

BSM (Blind Spot Monitor): These (lights on the side mirrors) have been around a while, are good, and work great. I’m a bit embarrassed to say for some reason I’m still having trouble explicitly looking at the lights when changing lanes. Even after a year, weird. My problem, not the car’s.

Safe Exit Assist: This seems good, but yet to have it trigger in a real life situation which is good. I do get a lot of false triggers after parking the car and walking beside it afterwards. I have to go back and make sure it isn’t some legit alarm.

Intuitive Parking Assist: (beeps based on distance sensors) A good (and not very new) feature, but really noisy. My garage parking is pretty tight, so it is pretty much a continuous alarm from the back bumper getting within a few feet of the garage entrance to hitting the park button. It is the side sensors getting panicky.

RCTA (Rear Cross Traffic Alert): Great feature and has legitimately warned me several times.

Parking Braking features (many): Very jarring when it trips, you think you have hit something but it is just the brakes. It’s only triggered on me twice, both false alarms. Once when backing into some tall grass and once backing into my garage. I’m pretty sure some day it will save me from a fender bender.

PCA (Pre-Collision Alert) and Emergency Driving Stop System: Hope to never test these!

Rear Pedestrian detection: Pretty impressed with this feature! It hasn’t saved me from a bad situation yet, but nice to know we’re both looking.

 

TIRES:

Yes, they look cool, but it still bugs me that those pretty tires are costing me about 10% fuel/electron economy. No spare either adds to it. I’m too cheap to proactively replace the tires, but they are on my wish list. The true decision time will be when these tires need replacing. If bold I’ll replace the wheels, not just the tires and get some kind of spare kit. Since it’s a Prime I can’t use one of those nice kits that lets you store the tire under the rear storage mat. The spare tire will consume already scarce storage space, ick. The three main choices of a donut, full spare wheel, or just a spare tire all seem viable, I just need to decide which is best for me. For road tripping, the latter two seem better.

Of note, one big surprise is that the manual says you CANNOT use snow chains on the 19” rims, only the 17” rims!! No explanation why either. That’s a big deal for me here in Colorado. One more reason for 17” rims.

 

120V OUTLETS AND WIRELESS CHARGER:

This is something I really wanted, but must admit I’ve barely used it. The one annoyance is the outlet in the center console is really hard for the front passenger to use and even then is only two-prong and my wife’s laptop power supply is 3-prong. It works great, provides a very clean signal, and after a lot of consternation over grounding not as worried about it. I had posted some nice oscilloscope waveform pictures both under load and lightly loaded, but looking back at that post, the pictures are gone.

Alas the wireless charger doesn’t work with my particular phone, a Galaxy S21 Ultra. It is a physically big phone and suspect the car’s coil doesn’t line up well with the phone’s. It only transfers a little power and the phone gets really hot, so seems like poor registration. Even on my home charger I have to put it down quite accurately to get charging to work. Letting other folk with more “normal” sized phones use the charger seems to be fine.

 

IT IS PRETTY!

After two decades of being perfectly happy (and proud) with frumpy and frugal over pretty and sporty, it is weird having a car that gets complements on its looks. I handle them awkwardly (but it’s the cars features, not looks that matter, right?). The more enjoyable complements are when I overhear them from folk not knowing me or that it’s my car.

SIZE:

It is bigger—especially compared to my Gen1. I had to re-arrange stuff in my garage to reclaim some breathing room for both depth and width. I still have to fold the driver side mirror to get the garbage can in/out of the garage. I also have had to get used to getting “down” into the car and “up” out of it.

BTW, for really accurate back-in parking, now that I finally have a car with a rear camera I can finally do this (Parking lines | PriusChat). It provides a level of precision that is amazing using only the regular backup camera and duct tape.

 

SUBSCRIPTIONS:

Somewhat grumpily, I am getting the navigation/remote control package. The main reason is that package is required for Traffic Jam Assist (TJA). I can’t find the post, but someone explained it nicely in that for that feature to be possible, the car MUST know it’s on an interstate. It allows the car to start from a dead stop autonomously and that would be very bad on a city street with stoplights and stop signs. Toyota can’t rely on Google maps for liability reasons, so regrettably understand them tying it to mapping data they control. I don’t use Toyota’s navigation either, Google Maps is my preferred one, so it is just for TJA. The remote monitoring is nice, but not worth $15/mo. Weirdly, I find $15/mo more objectional than $180/yr, not sure why. If I get extra grumpy, I may just let the subscription lapse and only renew it for major road trips.

 

ANNOYANCES:

No car is perfect. While minor, these are my biggest annoyances somewhat in order. Some I’ve covered before, but putting the list here:

No spare tire: This is the tough one to get comfortable with.

Tire size: I do want 17” tires for efficiency, just not sure if I want to spring the funds to “fix” it. No snow chains either is weird. It does sound like replacements of any kind will be hard due to the unusual size.

Cargo space: Not a surprise, but still very real compared to previous Prii we’ve had.

Visibility: The lack of rear visibility is well documented and accurate. The other issue is downward visibility both forward and to the side. The windows are narrow. Making right turns is scary since I’m scared of hitting a curb.

The Toyota App: It could be so much better. It just feels like a “minimum necessary” app. I know the battery charge state is fiction, but it would be nice if they could lie consistently.

Android Auto connection: If anything more than an errand, I connect wired. Wireless just isn’t reliable enough. Even when wired, I still get random disconnects. I have no idea if it is the phone, car, or both. A hard infotainment reset fixes it or simply re-connecting using the menus works too.

Wireless charger: I like the concept, but as implemented, it is way too dependent on phone dimensions to be general purpose.

“Midnight charging bug”: If you define a charge start and end time, the car stops charging unconditionally at midnight. This seems fixed on the 2024 models, so hoping some day an OTA update will fix this. I have a decent workaround, but this is such a basic testing error it’s worrisome.

Again, all of the above are tolerable and given all the good stuff below, still giving the car a solid “A”.

 

THE GOOD STUFF:

As a three-time Prius purchaser I had high expectations and they have been met. Below are the highlights that were both expected and surprising—including things that get panned a lot online, but were not an issue for me at all.

It’s a still a Prius: At it’s core it is still what a Prius is famous for, great fuel economy and super-reliable. The extra power and good looks get a lot of attention (and awards), but at its core it is still high tech in pursuit of low cost-of-ownership. On reliability the jury is still out, but other than the 12V battery, no issues so far. It has a lot to live up to: my Gen1 only needed about $2,500 in non-scheduled maintenance for the 20 years I had it.

Driver Display: All the reviews about the bad placement really scared me. It was a huge “condition” for rejecting the car when I had to put down a deposit. Maybe because I like to sit upright it has never been an issue.

Power: Yes, it is fun to play every once in a while. I’ve had no objections to my previous Prii, so this wasn’t a deciding factor, but still fun to play sometimes.

Plug-in Hybrid: I’m a good use case for it and it hasn’t disappointed. All-electric around town and a 10,000MPH charge rate for road trips is perfect.

Driver assist features, especially Traffic Jam Assist: Compared to previous cars that only had cruise control, TSS3.0 is a huge step forward and I didn’t realize how much they reduce driver workload and fatigue—especially on long road trips.

Cabin Noise: Compared to the previous Prii, this car is very quiet, both for wind and tire noise. Throw in electric mode for no engine noise and it is very quiet.

Comfort: For long road trips, I’ve needed extra seat padding for both previous cars, so this was a concern with the PPPXP. No extra padding needed, I had no issues with10+ hour driving days.

 

NEW PARADIGMS:

Power can be useful! With the older Prii, if there was any sticky situation—particularly with me merging or others merging into my lane (yes, being a good Prius driver I’m almost always in the slow lane), the only practical solution has been to slow down. On two lane highways, I VERY rarely ever passed another car. Even now with having the PPPXP for a year, that is still my instinct. When I purposely override that instinct and “punch it”, it is impressive. Power can definitely be a solution to some problems and pretty fun to use that solution.

Binary driving: Many years back, while driving a rental car in the EU with a buddy, he pointed out that I was a binary driver. He explained that when driving around if I needed to accelerate, it was full throttle until I reached my speed, then backed off. After thinking about it a bit, it made sense. With the older Prii, if you need to accelerate for anything like merging, full throttle was the way to go, you have to in order to get to a decent speed in time. That was an important lesson the first few months of the car, learning that there were spots in between coasting and full throttle that made sense.

 

If you got to the end of this, I'm impressed! I've been a Prius fan since the Gen1 and clearly still am, the only major unconfirmed issue is long term reliability. The jury for that issue will hopefully not conclude for another 19 years. I hope the 12V battery and back doorlock issues are just minor startup problems which in some sense should be expected with a new model year.

It is nice to finally start seeing them a LOT more.

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