{"id":1907119,"date":"2026-04-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1907119"},"modified":"2026-04-28T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T21:00:00","slug":"toyota-prius-long-term-review-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1907119","title":{"rendered":"Toyota Prius – long-term review"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Well, it happened. The nightmare scenario for the charging-at-home hybrid\/EV driver. Particularly in the early stages of a fuel-panic. My wallbox charger packed up.<\/p>\n

What broke it, funnily enough, was Editor Jack\u2019s Maserati GranTurismo Folgore.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I had relegated the Prius to the kerb and plugged the big Maser in for an overnight charge. A few minutes after I\u2019d gone to bed, something Italian and flamboyant disagreed with the charging box, which promptly died. When I needed to get cracking at around 5 o\u2019clock the following morning, the frigidly cold Maserati had about half the range I needed. Great.<\/p>\n

Anyway, you know the drill. I checked the fusebox breaker switch. All was well. I turned the box on and off again. I did the hard reset dance. I updated the app, deleted it, redownloaded it, and taught it to speak to my wi-fi router all over again. Sign out, sign in. The charger stubbornly refused to wake up.<\/p>\n

Luckily, the Evec EVC01 (Britain\u2019s cheapest home charger at the time of installation 18 months ago) was still under warranty, and after some email back-and-forth, an engineer was dispatched by the nice folks at Ascent Energy to replace a fuse which, they admitted, had become a known problem with these units.<\/p>\n

The fix took less than an hour and came free of charge, so to speak. Since, it\u2019s been good as gold.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the meantime I had a two-week period living with a plug-in hybrid I couldn\u2019t plug-in. If I\u2019d had a full EV, I\u2019d have been depending on the public network. But a PHEV gives you options\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Toyota says the three-pin plug can replenish the car in four hours from a 220V household socket. Hmm. I plugged the Prius into my garage\u2019s wall socket and the car told me to come back and unplug in six hours. Not exactly convenient unless it\u2019s an overnight job. And I don\u2019t want to leave my garage door open overnight.<\/p>\n

Yes, I could\u2019ve gone to a public charging station, but I didn\u2019t. For three good reasons.<\/p>\n

One: the Prius can only accept charge at a maximum rate of 3.5kW \u2013 half the rate even my home wallbox spits out electricity. So it can\u2019t use rapid chargers and it would be trapped there for several hours. I like YouTube and doomscrolling as much as the next millennial, but there are limits to procrastination.<\/p>\n

Two: public chargers are, as I\u2019m sure you know, often a complete rip-off. The biggest cluster nearby, at a motorway services 20 minutes from home, costs more per mile than super-unleaded petrol.<\/p>\n

Three: every time I\u2019m in a depleted EV and I find a plug-in hybrid is tethered to a charger, I think the owner is the single most selfish person on the face of the Earth. You\u2019ve got an engine. What are you doing taking the place of a car that needs<\/em> a charger?<\/p>\n

So, a fortnight in a purely petrol Prius. Observations? Well it\u2019s amazing how much the supposedly depleted battery insists on silent, all-EV running around town. Below 10mph the car would regularly shut the engine off. Parking was silent as the Prius always employs e-power to reverse. So as an urban car, it remains economical and very refined. Even a flat-battery Prius can be coaxed to over 60 miles per gallon.<\/p>\n

But because I spend my motoring life plodding up and down motorways where re-gen opportunities are limited, my average settled down in the mid 50s, and I missed the lusty whoosh of e-power helping zoom the car along sliproads. Fiftysomething to the gallon ain\u2019t bad \u2013 the car managed almost 400 miles on its ickle 40-litre tank of petrol \u2013 but somehow I hoped for more.<\/p>\n

Look how streamlined the Prius is. You\u2019re driving an eel, brimming with three decades of Toyota hybrid R&D. You\u2019re putting up with a small boot, cramped rear headroom, and the mooing protests of an e-CVT. You\u2019re making compromises to have the most fuel-efficient car possible, but the Prius sans-charge ended up matching mpgs with my brother\u2019s 12-year old Golf turbodiesel. Which has a big boot. And roomy back seats.<\/p>\n

Now the charger is back up and running, the Prius is back in its comfort zone. In a week where I need not venture 100 miles southward to the Top Gear office, the town-bound Prius is a pure EV. It pootles about with the engine in hibernation, with 160 horsepower more than adequate to make it a nippy short-range shuttle. And with a full charge costing about less than \u00a33 on an overnight tariff, it\u2019s extremely cheap motoring, backed up with the knowledge that should I need to be in the Scottish Highlands by nightfall (not unheard of working at Top Gear) or if my charger fritzes, there\u2019s no range anxiety.<\/p>\n

Ironically, with fuel prices now rising faster than a ballistic missile, I\u2019ve now gone totally the other way. The engine never turns on. I\u2019m running the car, as much as possible, as a pure EV. Don\u2019t let me down now, charger.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, it happened. The nightmare scenario for the charging-at-home hybrid\/EV driver. Particularly in the early stages of a fuel-panic. My wallbox charger packed up. What broke it, funnily enough, was Editor Jack\u2019s Maserati GranTurismo Folgore. I had relegated the Prius to the kerb and plugged the big Maser in for an overnight charge. A few […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[226,237],"class_list":["post-1907119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crawlmanager","tag-topgear-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1907119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1907119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1907119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1907119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1907119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1907119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}