100th car I’ve driven!

It’s a rental I got my hands on. But not the kind that ends up in the Everglades or a dirt road unfortunately. This car made me laugh more than an F82 M4 for all the wrong reasons.

This car has “an engine” that barely registers that’s it’s doing something other than make a hum. The electric power cuts off past what felt like 25% throttle input. Even when put into its mildly annoyed mode, this Prius moves with the urgency of a Soviet bureaucrat. What little acceleration there is goes through the smoothest CVT I’ve ever felt. It makes far more expensive luxury cars feel jerky between shifts by comparison. Hell, other cars with CVTs feel worse due to their attempt at mimicking shift points. Outside of a model 3, I don’t think I’ve felt a car that accelerates this linearly. Granted it’s not like the engine makes enough of anything to do something else.

But you knew that going in. A Prius is slow, abysmally so. How about the braking?

The pedal has decent travel, with a fairly progressive engagement. It’s not twitchy, but I wasn’t ready to trust it, much less when pushing it. The car also has a “B” mode you can select, which actives “engine braking” and helps recharge the batteries. You selected via the knob…

Speaking of that knob, behold… THIS… uh… thing:

It goes between reverse, neutral, go, and “engine brake mode”, which lets you recharge under deceleration. It’s got translucent blue plastic on it. It moves around like a child’s play thing at a doctors office.

The interior is weird. It’s black on white? Grey? Whrey? There is your standard Toyota infotainment system, and a center display that show you more relevant information. Speed is displayed on the left corner, along with some displays on efficiency and temperature. Like the model 3 this so obviously competes with, the Prius is devoid of a traditional gauge cluster behind the wheel, because the waltz of progress is unstoppable I guess.

The steering is numb, and it understeered horribly while entering a parking lot at 20mph. At higher speeds, the steering doesn’t talk, and giving inputs makes the chassis move laterally across the tires. The tires don’t break grip and slide, no no no, the chassis slides over it’s suspension. It’s the most bizarre thing and the less I talk about it the better for my mental state.

Driving dynamics had never this car’s main focus… though sometimes it felt like it wasn’t even an afterthought… no we all know this car’s sole purpose is to sip gas like a hamster. And it does that well to the determent of pretty much every other aspect of the driving. Hell you can even toggle a more efficient AC mode. It does grade you out of 100 on how efficient you drive, which quickly becomes a dumb little game. However, unlike when, say a BMW does this in eco-pro mode, there’s nothing else this car offers you.

The sound system is fine I guess.

There really isn’t much else to say about this dreary testament to efficiency. It’s hilariously slow and inept at trying to be anything else other than “an Prius”. In its shittiness, there was hilarity in just how abysmal the car was, but I’m not dying to do it again.

At least the new one looks better.