Has Anybody Slammed their Prius, or Turbo'ed it? What is the freakiest Prius you have ever seen?

You'll find plenty of lowered ones and some great JDM body kits.

Actual speed mods are rarer. The Atkinson cycle Prius engine does not lend itself to turbocharging, not by a long shot. One guy swapped in a Yaris cam to make it a mostly-Otto cycle for some interesting gains but I don't think he had any plans for a turbo as the compression was already too high.

If you want to make a Prius really really fast you pretty much need to ditch everything under the hood and start over. Lots of Corolla and Matrix things will fit in its place, and once the hybrid transaxle is gone you can offload the battery for major weight reduction.

Welcome and good luck!

 

If you’re on Instagram you can search up qspwr . Lots of eye candy.

 

Biggest hassle with making a Prius fast is that all the sensors are precisely tuned towards maximum fuel efficiency. So all the usual ways to boost power in a car don't work in a Prius. It just throws up the warning lights and puts the car in limp mode. But I do know a guy who shaved a second off his 1/4 mile time with an aftermarket solenoid from Japan. He was also able to find a larger throttle body, but haven't heard the results of that effort yet. Beyond that there's chassis stiffening to speed up around corners and also there's eventually going to be a high performance Lithium pack by person who makes Dr. Prius app, which will boost your electric power in a way that doesn't upset the ECU: Rainbow Prius Hybrid Powered by Lithium! | PriusChat

 

If I were to hod rod a Prius, I'd fit in a high power Lithium Ion battery (or maybe even an ultracapacitor battery??) somewhere and figure out how to put a rear axle on the car with a powerful electric motor.

For where I live, I've thought about putting some sort of supercharger on the engine just big enough to meet sea level air pressures.

 

There are aftermarket electric motor wheels you could put on as a separate system, but super expensive and no guarantee warning lights won't show up... As for Lithium, you have to convince the car's computers that the power curve of the Lithium is exact same as original NiMH pack or you get warning lights and car goes into to limp mode.

 

How about a Prius with a Hellcat Hemi transplant .... would be a great sleeper if it wasn't so noisy


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^ I'd be curious to see how they tubbed that one.

 

the door was opened by the op - once he said, "... what's the freakiest one you've ever seen" ... and this thing meets the bill.
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I wasn't disputing the suitability of your post- I think it's a great find!

If you aren't familiar with the term, "tubbing" refers to the process of widening the rear wheel wells, biased towards the centerline to accommodate extremely wide tires for traction.

Typically requires a very narrow solid rear axle and custom wheels. Typically this leaves the rear trunk/cargo area with the proportions of a bathtub.

That's a lot of work when you're starting with a Prius; hence my curiosity.

 

An Australian supercharged, then turbocharged, a Gen 0 Prius, he was surprised to discover it charged the battery much better than stock, but did not travel much faster than stock.

Here is the supercharging.
AutoSpeed - Technokill: Building a Blown Hybrid, Part 1
AutoSpeed - Technokill: Building a Blown Hybrid, Part 2
AutoSpeed - Technokill: Building a Blown Hybrid, Part 3
He found the Prius so loud it was ruining his marriage. So far I have not found the turbo article, but it was quieter.
(it was not a kit, he hand fabricated all the tubing)

 

I believe I read about the Hellcat Prius that it's simply a shell placed on a different frame. Don't know what kind of frame, but you can probably find it somewhere.

 

I was thinking more like a rear Tesla axle with a battery system separate from the NiMH battery. Obviously there would need to be lots of fabrication, like the fuel tank be redigned and placed somewhere else.

 

That's not thinking, that's dreaming... That requires hundreds of hours of basic labor and many, many hours of complicated, near impossible hacks.

Prius are all about getting a long ways down the road for as little cost & pollution as possible. It's not a yacht that needs lots of work...

 

Unless you change the cam and turbo the engine and such, any mod going after huge power gains is going to require an engine/motor replacement. And fitting it in is going to "require hundreds of hours of basic labor and many, many hours of complicated, near impossible hacks."

I think this is a much bettery idea than back when I had my Nissan Leaf and 1985 VW Golf diesel. I almost started cutting the golf in half and making it a pusher trailer to push my Leaf long distances.

 

never doubt mankind's ability to waste tons of resources & time into doing things for no good reason. If you can sink the amount necessary into something like the Prius below (which btw has been done by several folks), then yes, it COULD be done.;



Just think of the size of the battery pack that you could put into that many square feet of floor space

yes - and there's no way I could begrudge anybody sinking so much of their life into such projects since I dropped a Shelby 289 into a 1971 Pinto. At least the seats & body & dash was still a pinto. C4 tranny with a shift kit, custom headers, high rise intake manifold , dual Hollies, custom radiator and an Old's rear end - shortened down a whole LOT. And yes not much cargo space left once you throw Massive Tires on the back. The one thing not accounted for was diameter rise during burnouts, which severely shredded a row of tire tread when it'd spin up into the upper edge of the sheet metal body. All those hours. It should have been donated to my family rather than my own OCD.

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Yeah, you're talking a foreign language when it comes to Prius... Cams and Turbos? All that does is get the Prius computers detecting an inefficiency and shutting the car down into limp mode and you can't drive it anymore. It's kinda like you're trying to make a better tasting breakfast but all your improvements for the taste of the food is based on bacon and eggs and instead you're applying those improvements to a bowl of cereal. It makes no sense!

 

Any cam or turbo mod, unless slightly different than stock, will need the ECU reprogramed. The Prius is still just a gasoline powered car, and the ECU doesn't really care how efficient the engine really is. You could drive around with the parking brake on all day and the car will never go into limp mode just because it's detecting an "inefficiency." Limp mode happends with an ECU thinks the car could suddenly destroy itself and leave you stranded. Limp mode is to do exactly what it implies, limp you along until you get somewhere safe instead of shutting down and leaving you stranded on, let's say, a railroad track crossing.

People mod and reprogram their cars all the time, this is pretty standard. Yes it can be a pain to get the right "electronic tune" once you make major changes to the engine. But it's not impossible. I've done some reprogramming before, it's not rocket science.

I guess one downside of doing a Prius is you'd probably be the first to do it so you won't have the benefit of seeing someone else's trial and error project nor parts built just for your Prius. But it definitely can be done.

Take a look at Engineering Explained's trial and error with his Miata MX-5's supercharged upgrade. He's had to try a few different tunes to get it to boost right and it's still not as smooth as he'd like. It could be fine tuned more of course.

 

My Prius Prime Drives Itself | PriusChat that has the biggest wow factor for me