I'm Going To Turn This Prius Prime PHEV Into A Hot Hatch - The Autopian Article was nice, but a commenter named RootWyrmb offers some very interesting technical advice on wheel and tire choices after. Be sure and scroll through. He even offers links! "Math works out like this; 225/50R18 on 7.5 jumps the rolling radius by only 12mm and the contact patch by ~+50cm^2 to ~287cm^2! Stiffness increases from 24kg/mm to 28kg/mm, so it doesn’t completely destroy ride quality. Deflection goes from 20mm to 16mm too. Those are really, really solid numbers. Talking meaningful decrease in braking distance kind of numbers."
While I'm no expert, why 225/50/18? Why not 225/55/17 which is even closer to the stock 17s diameter but with even more sidewall? I'm also not sure 19x8 +45 235/45/19 from that picture of desired mods would fit on that car. It seems like it'll get pretty close to suspension parts according to some rim and tire size calculators. The rear anti-roll bar/sway bar is interesting, sucks there's no part numbers or actually trying it out yet. I would be curious to see how much of a difference it makes. There's some already available but they're a few hundred dollars.
Yeah, but that quite big guy is not the prius hot hatch creator, he's the chief engineer of the Tacoma!
