Gadgetory

it's the Prius the green car activists have been screaming for us since Toyota first invented this car now it's here in production form let's plug in to the 2012 Prius plug-in and check the tech well here it is 2012 production Prius plug-in we drove a prototype a few months ago but this is the real deal available now only in the west coast and Northeast states why do you get a plug-in Prius people ask me this question all the time here is the difference it's got a bigger battery that you charge both by driving like an irregular Prius and also by plugging it in when you can that's different than a standard Prius the reason you go to all this trouble and put this bigger battery in is to get more electric range a standard Prius can go a mile or two on battery only at low speeds this car can go 11 to 16 miles on battery only at up to 62 miles per hour it behaves like an electric car if you just use it around town in fact you might never put gas in this car if you have like a ten-mile commute each way that doesn't go beyond sixty miles an hour okay the plug-in hybrid doesn't have anything different in the cabin than a standard Prius we've got this head unit which I call in tune light it's the smaller screen at this point in history it only has Pandora and Bing from the Entune app suite later in 2012 they'll be adding things like movie tickets calm and open table if you upgrade this card to what's called the advanced model you get the better head unit we've seen before which is more Lexus like and that already has all the apps in it plus a bunch of other features come in that package now here's where you see your various energy monitors again those are also found on the Prius but you're going to see numbers here you're never going to see on a standard Prius like that one at the bottom middle consumption averaged over more than 300 miles 61 miles per gallon that's what a bigger battery is going to get you and like the current third gen Prius you can also look at all kinds of historical averages and you can enter the average consumption of your other car so this guy will always remind you how much you're saving by driving it versus the one in the garage and all these Prius plugins are nicely equipped they don't make a stripped one which is part of why the price is a little steep we'll get to that in a minute your sources are going to include am/fm HD radio satellite radio should you choose to activate it and of course you've got an optical drive up here a 2 DP bluetooth streaming and of course Bluetooth hands-free for telephony on a standard outlet this battery takes three hours to charge from dead flat or an hour and a half if you get a level 2 charger Fotis sells you a level 2 charger with their partner Leviton for about a grand installed at your house and of course when you drive you're also trickle charging the battery but you need to plug it in once in a while to get the full benefit when you lift the hood on the Prius you're getting into a very different world the motor is not that different from the standard Prius the battery is and the numbers that come out of it are also different so for example the battery in a standard Prius is nickel metal hydride 1.3 kilowatt-hours this guy has a more advanced lithium ion battery kind of a giant version of what's in your phone or laptop but 4.4 kilowatt hours more than three times the capacity and a different charging and discharging a view higher performance in combination with this 1.8 liter lean-burn gas engine like a standard Prius you get 95 mpg equivalent while driving in electric mode that means an equivalent amount of energy as gallons of gas turns into 95 mpg it's this tortured EPA calculation or if you're running in hybrid mode like a regular Prius you get the same 50 mpg average 134 horsepower by the way torque who cares the bottom line is this car is not about performance though it is slower than a standard Prius something around 11 seconds versus under 10 for the standard Prius partly due to a heavier battery 123 more pounds of weight on this guy but none of this really matters till we get inside see how it rides and drives and see what kind of consumption figures show up on that dash now driving the Prius plug-in you're just very aware that the engines not kicking and that's the main difference between this and a standard Prius the ride quality seems about the same I thought it was harsher when I first was driving the car today I don't think so not noticeably so anyway but you're seeing that easy mode light there on the eyebrow - on all the time instead of for behalf a mile or a quarter mile to go and you can get into the throttle and it doesn't kick into the gas engine it stays electric like I said up to 62 miles per hour this button right here though will let you become a standard hybrid by pressing it so you have HV or evey mode then of course there's eco mode and power mode which operate the same as they do on other hybrids including the Prius now in spite of the fact that I've got a bigger battery and more electricity available this is not a more performance oriented Prius it could be but the battery is not used that way they ring all the range out of it they can not all the torque out of it they can like let's say a Tesla Roadster Dennis so people ask me all the time what's the payoff time on this car and we already know that a hybrid takes a certain number of years to earn back the hybrid premium what about this one it's an even harder calculation because if you're driving type is that which you almost never use gas that's one entire calculation if you run this car down a lot and kick in two hybrid mode that's a completely different calculation okay let's price our Prius plug-in 32,000 bass compare that to the least expensive standard Prius at 24,000 pretty big difference but the price on the most comparable equipped Prius is more like 26 so that narrows it down to a little over $6,000 difference for the plug-in model on top of that though I'm going to add seventy one hundred dollars to go seen that style on this car I'm gonna get what they call the advanced trim that gets you the head-up display adaptive cruise hard drive nav JBL audio system all kinds of improvements including LED headlights it makes a big difference in terms of technology and the price seems fair if you're interested otherwise get one that's base drive it relatively short distances and you not even know what a gas station is in a few years