Operating a Prius Prime SE 2024: the first three months

Choosing the right car for us

Our first vehicle was, until late last year, our only vehicle: a 2009 Honda Fit we acquired at the end of 2008. Once it hit fifteen years old, we started looking for what would replace it. (Unfortunately we live in a part of Canada that isn’t downtown Toronto, Vancouver, or Montreal meaning that the country has been built in a way that requires car ownership.) We toyed with the idea of a full electric vehicle (a Battery Electric Vehicle or BEV) but I was the only driver in the household who found it neat to manage charge volumes and charger availability and regular prolonged recharge stops and on and on (aka “the BEV lifestyle”) so we didn’t end up going that route.

(( And let’s not forget to note that the criminally negligent policies and regulations around automotives in Canada have perverted the incentives of car makers to make not more than a token amount of a token variety of kinds of vehicle that can burn electrons pulled from a wall. Your choices in this country are basically Teslas or nothing, and Teslas can suck it. ))

We put a deposit down on a Toyota Prius Prime plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV for short — a car that runs both on stored electricity drawn from a socket as well as chemical energy liberated by exploding hydrocarbons) in mid 2023 with a probable delivery date of mid 2025. The Prius Prime with its all-electric range of 72km (in ideal conditions) would suit basically all of our use cases from day-to-day and week-to-week, and its range including the hybrid drivetrain (and let’s be frank: oversized gas tank) of around 900km would more than handle visits to far-flung family members. That it’s too long, too wide, and too heavy is annoying, but it was in 2023 and remained in 2024 the least-worst option.

Come mid-late 2024, I reach out to double-check that everything is still as it should be and just happen to send my email on the day that two Prius Primes were on the lot, ordered but unbought by people earlier than us on the list.

It was thus to our pleasant surprise that we were offered the opportunity to get our chosen new vehicle nearly a full year ahead of schedule at the end of October, 2024. Which was good, because our venerable Fit was making ever-more-concerning old-age noises.

Three months in

It’s fine?

It is definitely fulfilling the expected role of being able to bop around town only ever running on very clean electricity. We’re still getting into the habit of plugging it in when we park it so it’s always topped up, and I’m still learning just what a difference it makes when it’s cold or there’s a headwind. It’s being thwarted a bit by the weather and having two very different drivers, but it’s becoming a better estimator of its own range, getting as high as 53km in subzero (but not face-hurtingly-cold) temps. All in all I’ve so far never really been unpleasantly surprised by the beast.

But it _is_ a beast. We were going to park both it and the Fit in a two-car garage, but there’s no way to do that _and_ still have room to take out the garbage. Or get to our bicycles. Or gardening equipment. Or freezer. (And I went to such an effort to clean out the garage so we’d be able to. Alas.)

And it’s a bit of a beast to drive: it’s heavy. It has more power than I know what to do with, beyond getting it up to speed in a reasonable time. It does lead to having a very smooth ride, though, which I appreciate given the seasonal road deterioration.

I’m still finding new systems to turn off, though. Toyota packed it with all sorts of assists: lane-keeping, distance-keeping, cross-traffic-avoiding, lane-following, etc etc… quite a lot of them are pretty okay. Parking assist letting me know precisely how far my front or rear bumper is to what I’m parking next to? Wonderful. Adaptive cruise control that keeps its distance from any car in front of me? I like it.

But so many of these systems are taking a page from the Tech Industry and are being shipped while their behaviour is still, to a degree, stochastic. The driver inattention monitor 1) Uses a camera pointed at your face, which I hate, and 2) Can’t handle eyeglasses or sunglasses. Lane-keeping will tug the wheel if you’re stretching into the oncoming lane to avoid a cyclist (which the car failed to recognize). Lane-following will beep and give up if there’s snow on the road. The cross traffic monitor will yell at you when you take your foot off the brake, even if you’re just crawling forward to see around the tall grass. And will fail to notice cars behind you while reversing out of a parking space some of the time.

Meanwhile, they could’ve shipped deterministic systems that I’d love to leave on. Like remembering infotainment settings per driver (keyed to the key). Or allowing us to turn off the headlights when in Park gear or either of the Accessory modes. Or telling me the kWh it’s pulling down when charging, or how much it charged, or allowing me to start a charge outside of the schedule from the charging port instead of having to jump back behind the wheel. Or even just telling me why it’s running the gas-powered engine instead of the electrical one against my express wishes (reasons I know about from reading the manual (of course I read the manual): starting the front windshield defroster, it reaching -12 outside, it running out of electrons in the battery (aside from the 30% reserved for running the hybrid)).

And Android Auto? What a piece of junk that is. Unreliable connection, inability to compose messages on even Google Talk (now called Chat? Teams? GTalk? Meet? ICQ? Who knows), poor UI integration with VLC, keeps trying to play music on YouTube Music even when I tell it to stop.

And the bloody app? What a joke. Overflowing text. Terrible UI choices. Obvious mistranslation. Inability to open web links. Inscrutable organization. The only reason I keep using it is because it’s January and I can remote-start the heat pump, in-seat and in-steering-wheel heaters, and rear defrost. And its UI for creating charging schedules is at least better than trying to do so via the steering wheel controls.

It’s really easy to blame Canadian car culture (heavily imported from the US) for most of these problems, and the tech industry for the rest. Of course the car is too big: bigger cars are the current fad, against rhyme and reason. Of course the app and Android Auto are trash: there is no functional competition or regulation keeping these companies in check.

Not to say that there aren’t things that I don’t like about it. Heated seats and steering wheel. The smooth ride. The comfy seats. The styling of the interior and exterior. The backup camera (required by law in Canada since 2018). The USB ports. The sound system.

So, three months in: it’s fine. It was in 2023 and in 2024 the least-worst option, at least for us. And after owning it three months and into 2025, it still really is no more or less than that. If it were less car and less tech it could have been so much better. Alas.