bagwell

TOYOTA, RESTORED AS the world's largest auto maker by sales in 2013, produces lots of amazing vehicles. It makes the world's most durable small pickup, the Hilux. On the other side of the vehicular universe, there is the Lexus LFA, a carbon-bodied apparition with a naturally aspirated V10 engine and a spine-tingling 9,000 rpm redline. Me want.

Toyota 7203.TO -0.47% builds the best-selling sedan in America, the Camry; it builds full-size, steak-eating trucks in Texas (more than 1 million at last count). This company has bandwidth.

But the Prius Liftback, introduced 10 years ago, is Toyota's product-design masterpiece: a dead steady, massively functional, safe, flexible and affordable five-seater (in four trim levels, $24,200 to $30,005, plus $810 delivery) with fuel economy that makes it among the most fuel-efficient automobiles of any size sold in America, year after year. This year the EPA-rated fuel economy is a nice, round 50 miles per gallon, city and highway combined.

When a 2014 Prius (in the "Three" trim level, with navigation, cloth interior, and 15-inch wheels) showed up in my driveway last week, unbidden, I didn't even blink. I was rather hoping for something in an Aston Martin. But then I got in it and was again struck by the Prius's deep, considered brilliance. It still feels futuristic.

Let's just talk structure. According to the feds, this car has 93.7 cubic feet of passenger space and 21 cubic feet of trunk space—more than a Ford Fusion—and yet it weighs a mere 3,042 pounds, about the same as a new Porsche 911 Carrera. A similarly sized Ford C-Max hybrid is 600 pounds heavier. That is a fifth of a car!

“ In terms of practicality, there is no more rational car on Earth than the Prius. ”

No, the Prius Liftback isn't fast (0-60 mph in about 10 seconds) and it isn't sexy. It has small wheels, a big flat butt (a "Kamm" back, technically), and headlamps like eyes dazed in servitude. Though the smoothly arcing roofline is a model of efficiency in the wind tunnel (according to Toyota, a super-efficient 0.25 coefficient of drag), visually the Prius is a lump, a mogul, a neutered nubbin. It couldn't be more of an appliance if it weremade by Amana.

But if you are a commuter with kids to ferry and errands to perform, this is what the right tool looks like. If you possess a Manhattan taxi medallion, the Prius is so perfectly suited to your needs it is practically Platonic.

The Prius (Gen II, 2004-09) changed the automobile business. Let's go to the scorecard: 3 million Priuses sold world-wide, with half of that in the U.S. No longer merely a model, Prius is a brand, with the Prius v (wagon) and Prius c (coupe) joining the lineup in 2011. Meanwhile, Toyota's proprietary hybrid system—Hybrid Synergy Drive—pumps away in the hearts of more than 5 million Toyota and Lexus hybrids sold world-wide.

It is worth marking the anniversary and consider how far reaching and disruptive the Prius effect is. For one thing, Prius anticipated the direction of automobile powertrain design generally. Honda, too, was a pioneer in hybrid cars, starting with the 1999 Insight. Honda's Integrated Motor Assist technology used a permanent-magnet motor/generator essentially wrapped around the drive shaft to impart electric motor torque, as needed, and generate electricity under braking (regenerative braking).

But Honda's parallel-hybrid design prevented the Insight, or its other hybrids, from moving solely on electricity.

Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive—which made its debut on Prius II and is built around an elegant, horological planetary gearset—is a full hybrid design, allowing a car to move (slowly) under battery power alone, or gas power, but usually a blend of both, relying on sophisticated powertrain algorithms to optimize fuel economy and manage the frantic tides of electrons sluicing among motor-generators and batteries. The Toyota architecture thus provides a broad range of efficiency in slow-speed, stop-start urban traffic.

As if to provide a clinical comparison of the two approaches, in 2010 Honda unveiled the second-generation Insight hybrid, a Prius-like car that was and still is slightly cheaper, substantially lighter and a little less powerful than the Prius. And yet the Insight's fuel economy, 42 mpg combined, couldn't approach the Prius.

And because so much of the Prius's powertrain efficiency depends on software, it grows increasingly efficient with each generation. Toyota officials have said the next generation Prius (2015) will be 10% more efficient than the current model. That pencils out to 55 mpg and about 160 grams of CO2 per mile.

While the principals of hybrid propulsion have been around at least as long as Ferdinand Porsche's Lohner Mixste (1900), the Gen II Prius was the first fully realized gas-electric hybrid car, and there were plenty of doubters. GM dismissed hybrids as an interim technology while promising the ultimate solution was hydrogen fuel-cell technology. GM begged regulators to relent on fuel-economy standards so that precious R&D moneys could be devoted to the hydrogen endgame. And we are still waiting.

You could have built a bridge to Tokyo with all the wood-head experts who predicted Prius battery failures would cost consumers thousands. Battery failure rates in Prius turned out to be practically nil. In California and New York, the battery pack is warranted for 10 years or 150,000 miles. Hybrid components like the power electronics and motor are covered for 15 years or 150,000 miles.

The Prius became politicized along the way, a dog-whistle phrase that meant liberal, lefty. But are we talking artsy-fartsy? Because there is no more rational car on Earth than the Prius. I mean, come on. Look at it. How unmoved by aesthetics must you be to own a car like this? A roomful of monkeys typing for a billion years couldn't come up with a scenario where this car is sexy. The Prius is an utter rebuke to emotionalisms such as performance and style. Doesn't that rather speak to an owner with practical cast of mind?

Before leaving politics: There is a federal tax credit on the purchase of most plug-in hybrid models, but the Toyota long ago exhausted its manufacturers' allotment. That hasn't seemed to slow down sales.

The enduring mystery of the Prius is how a car with quite modest driving satisfactions—in terms of acceleration, handling, cornering, ride compliance—can be such a winning automotive experience. These cars are, still, strangely fun to drive. Of course, there is the mileage nerd-factor, and the near-hypnotic graphics illustrating the doings of the hybrid system. But it is also that the Prius feels uniquely apart from other cars, a separateness underscored by the casually futuristic interior, with its flying-buttress console design and contrasting lightweight, plant-based plastics, each with a unique texture, from rice paper to fine-grit sandpaper.

After 10 years, the Prius still feels like what comes next.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...65642403753528

Hoovey689

iTrader: (16)

So is this just saying the Prius is a runaway success? Not sure what the article is trying to convey

Harbinger

Nope...nope...nope...nope...nope...nope...nope...nope...nope...nope...nope...nope...

I totally respect the tech, just like I respect the surgical skill it takes to put oversized implants in an undersized body, but the end result of both is the same...Nope.