Gadgetory

as promised Toyota is turning their Prius into a family joining the original is the bigger V the more electrified plug-in and this the smaller C let's drive the cheapest way to get a Prius badge in your garage and check the tech no cars should look that much like one of these but color aside the Prius C is a smaller Prius in both engine and in total package size it weighs 2,500 pounds about as little as a production car does these days and 500 pounds less than a standard Prius it's 19 inches shorter and as a 3 foot smaller turning radius that makes a real difference when you're parking or making that illegal u-turn you always do you've got several displays inside this guy with this kind of weird offset dashboard it's very much Prius like up there you've got a multi information display all of these prius c's have that one this one is only in the upper two trim levels the three and the four and I think it's optional as a package or a line item in each case it's a very simple navigation system as you can see it's on a small screen as well but I've got an apps button that means I've got a version of Toyotas in tune service in here you've got Pandora you've got fuel price lookup Bing search this is a different interface that we've seen before I don't like it nearly as much but it's a lower cost unit so I get it endless screens on here to check out your energy consumption and pat yourself on the back and even told there's a way you can input the MPG of your other car and this one will tell you how much you're saving by driving this car but all this cabin tech in here is not the point to my mind on a Prius C I would not load it up like this in fact you may have seen a recent survey by RL pulp the big car data company that indicated that only 35% of folks who had a hybrid bought another one in 2011 when they replaced the car so it's a pretty small number of return customers they're finding out they can do just as well in many cases with a small lean four cylinder gas engine car and I'd have to earn back the premium on a hybrid we'll talk more about pricing later the rest of this cabin is pretty familiar Prius stuff you've got these little Prius controller wheels here on the steering wheel you've got the similar Prius style shifter which has the B position for additional regenerative brake capture of energy to the battery and here's your Eco mode and your evey mode eco makes it run very lean Leigh with gas and electric evey mode of course forces the car to run on electric motor as much as it can and unlike some toda hybrid products like the Lexus ct200h there's no sport mode on this car and that's good now under the hood it's a Toyota so our hybrid system is right there Hybrid Synergy Drive this is a one and a half liter gas engine couple of an electric motor this is like in the earlier pre I the big Prius has now moved on to a 1.8 liter total combined horsepower here is ninety nine horsepower you can't combine the electric and the gas engine total horse powers together it's a common mistake because they're blended they're not totally additive and of course it's a side saddle front-wheel drive and you've got a CVT only as your transmission okay under way if you think this car is going to really feel like 99 horsepower which is all it has you're in for a bit of a surprise in certain throttle positions and transitions it feels quite a bit more sprightly those numbers would tell you where the car Peters out is once you get into anything more than just sort of poking around town 30 40 miles an hour and getting up and down from that around town that's great because this car is light and not 2l sound insulated shall we say you hear all kinds of noises it's not a very refined experience but again for the money that could be alright the ride quality on the Prius C is about what you'd expect a short wheelbase car with a fairly unrefined suspension but it does have that belly full of batteries giving this car a little more planted it so it doesn't ride as poorly as some of the lightest teeny of small cars I've driven it's actually got pretty decent run quad I'm pricing out the cheapest C in this case because that's how I approach this car a C one starts at about nineteen 750 delivered now at that level you can't even option a sunroof or an LCD screen head unit with nav or in tune but it will have all the important media sources and it's the cheapest way to get into Toyota's vaunted hybrid technology though still an arguable financial case