2017 Toyota Prius Prime first drive: The hybrid top dog goes plug-in

[Suarez™]

Toyota is the world leader in hybrids, pioneering their development as mass-market transportation alternatives 25 years ago and then selling way more of them than any other carmaker on the planet. Toyota now offers a total of 13 hybrid models, and those make up 70 percent of the hybrid market.

But as for plug-in hybrids, well, that’s a different story.

Toyota has always danced around electricity like it was afraid it’d get zapped. When other carmakers were making dedicated EVs to meet California’s draconian ZEV Mandate, Toyota converted the bare minimum number of RAV4s to electric drive, first with less efficient nickel-metal hydride batteries, then by just turning the whole thing over to Tesla for the second-gen RAV4 EV. After that, Toyota abandoned pure EVs altogether in the headlong pursuit of hydrogen fuel cells as the ZEV holy grail. Similarly, Toyota lagged behind other carmakers in plug-in hybrids. The previous Prius plug-in offered only about 12 miles of range on electricity alone, while the first-generation Chevy Volt was getting almost three times that much.

With a new Toyota Prius Prime plug-in hybrid arriving in dealerships Nov. 3, has that changed? The 2017 Prius Prime gets a bigger battery that doubles its range on pure electricity to 25 miles, but it still lags behind most competitors. While Prius Prime’s 25 miles electric now beats the Ford C-Max and Fusion Energi’s 19-mile EV range, the Sonata plug-in can go 27 miles and the Chevy Volt now covers a whopping 53 miles on a charge. And Honda’s coming 2018-model-year PHEV is said to go 40 miles on electricity alone.