Toyota Prius Review (2016-2022)

What is the Toyota Prius?

Once upon a time, the Toyota Prius was little more than a curiosity – an unusual looking family car with a bizarre propulsion system that combined petrol and electric power to produce fuel consumption figures that weren’t far short of remarkable.

Little did we know back then that the Prius name would become well-known the world over - even to those with relatively little interest in motoring - as a byword for a new, eco-friendly type of car: the hybrid.

Today the Prius is into its fourth generation. This is the most flamboyantly styled of the bunch, too; early examples feature a wild mix of sweeps, creases and unusually-shaped lamps, and while a facelift in 2018 toned things down a little, its teardrop profile still catches the eye. Beneath the skin, though, it still combines a petrol engine with an electric motor to maximise fuel economy. It was replaced by the fifth-generation Prius in 2022.

How practical is it?

The Prius isn’t just unusual on the outside; inside, the main instrument cluster features colour screens instead of dials, and sits on top of the swoopy dashboard, in the centre of the car.

This layout takes a bit of getting used to, but there’s also a head-up display in all but the most basic version that puts essential information right in your eyeline.

Some of the plastics feel a little cheap to the touch, and the entertainment system can be quite fiddly to use, but on the whole the Prius feels solidly built and well thought out inside.

It’s a spacious car, too, with lots of room in the front and rear seats for passengers, and a long, shallow boot of 457 litres with a space saver spare wheel or 502 litres with a tyre repair kit in place of the spare.

What's it like to drive?

You wouldn’t expect an eco-friendly car to be all that exciting to drive, and in the Prius’s case, that’s certainly true. Having said that, it turns into corners well, with plenty of grip from the front end, and while the steering’s rather light, it’s still precise and responsive.

In short, bowling the Prius down a back lane is no longer the chore it once was, but even so, you probably won’t find yourself taking the long way home out of choice.

You’ll feel big bumps in the Prius, too, although it’s very good at ironing out the smaller ones, and once you get it up to speed on a motorway, it cruises along nicely.

The engine is also reasonably quiet most of the time, although it’ll make quite a bit of a racket if you try to accelerate hard. That's due to the continuously variable transmission (CVT) - the special type of automatic transmission that the Prius uses - which we’ll come back to presently.

Technology, equipment & infotainment

Even the most basic Prius, the Active, is well equipped, with features such as adaptive cruise control, LED headlights and a reversing camera as standard.

Our favourite version, the Business Edition, adds heated seats, classier dashboard materials and automatic wipers.

Business Edition Plus gives you a better sound system and satellite navigation, while the top-of-the-range Excel adds the likes of leather seats and a 360-degree parking camera.

Toyota Prius running costs

The standard Prius is pretty efficient, and should see more than 60mpg on average in your day-to-day driving. What’s more, because of the way hybrid technology works, you should get that sort of fuel economy whether you’re cruising on the motorway or bimbling around town. If you choose the AWD version, however, the extra weight of the additional motor means that mpg figure will drop to around 55.

If you’re planning to choose a Prius as a company car, there’s good news here, too, because low CO2 emissions and reasonable P11D values keep benefit-in-kind tax costs down to very affordable levels. And if you have somewhere to plug in at home, the Prius Plug-In will cost you even less, as its much lower CO2 will mitigate the effect of its higher P11D value.

Prius servicing costs are affordable, too, even at a Toyota dealership. An intermediate service shouldn’t cost you any more than it would for a conventionally powered mainstream family car, and you should find that the rest of the Prius’s maintenance and repair costs are similarly reasonable.

What’s more, the Prius’s 1.8-litre petrol engine is fitted with a timing chain that will almost certainly last the life of the car, instead of a rubber belt that needs replacing every few years.

Toyota Prius reliability

Let’s address the elephant in the room first: the battery. Some used car buyers are put off hybrids because they’re worried about the potential cost of replacing the large battery they come with.

However, this is unlikely to be an issue with the Prius. For starters, Toyota warrants its hybrid batteries for 15 years, as long as you keep your car serviced to Toyota’s standards. What’s more, we haven’t really heard of older Priuses requiring battery replacement yet, unless they’ve done super-high mileages.

If you do need to get your battery replaced outside of its warranty, the cost will be somewhere between £1,000 and £1,500. While that isn’t insignificant, neither would it be enough to write the car off until it’s very old indeed.

As for the reliability of the rest of the car, the signs are pretty promising. The Prius scored 98.4 per cent in the 2019 What Car? Reliability Survey, ranking it highly in the survey as a whole and better than almost all of the other family cars that took part.

Toyota as a brand didn’t do quite so well in the 2019 JD Power Vehicle Dependability Study, mind you, coming 18th out of the 24 manufacturers that took part. That said, the five-year, 100,000-mile warranty the Prius comes with should put your mind at ease either way.