By Marc J. Elzenbeck
My friend Valeo put a deposit down for a RAV-4 Prime, a ride in more demand than a Lamborghini. After waiting unfulfilled for almost 2 years, he sprang for a 5th-Gen Prius Prime. Both these plug-in vehicles are huge upgrades on Toyota’s solid hybrid tech, real game-changers in convenience and flexibility. Each packs an easily replaceable battery the size of a small travel suitcase (13.6 kWh for the Prius), providing 3-in-1 capabilities, with electric-only, conventional plus electric boost, and conventional engine modes. The Prime has 44 miles of EV ready and recharges overnight on a standard home outlet.
Due to travel logistics having to do with Iceland, I met Valeo at the Portland airport to pick up his battleship gray (“Guardian Gray”) model and drive it back to Vashon. In brief: you can take an all-EV trip to Costco in Tacoma, dawdle over to South Tacoma Way, then whoosh back from Point Defiance with range to spare. If for some reason you want to explore Puyallup, no worries: switch to hybrid mode and get a 75 mpg trip equivalent. Decide to extend your drive to Ellensburg and you’ll not touch a gas pump to nor fro, making only a dent in the 570-mile range. As the hardware goes, this car will probably last for over 300,000 miles, and it just doesn’t stop getting better from there.
The thing is fast, with a 0-60 time of 6.6 seconds, almost 4 seconds quicker than the Gen4 model, once publicly nicknamed “The Slowmobile.” It’s comfortable, with a supple yet sport-tuned suspension that swallows even Vashon’s jiggy roads with ease. Its distinctive, swoopy, great-looking styling manages to be both angular and ovoid. Any red-blooded kid from the 90s would instantly recognize it was built for go and beg for the keys. And they’d be right.
The Prius was, in fact, made by highly competitive young racing engineers following a “love at first sight” design ethos under the leadership of Satoki Oya. You feel it right away – effortless, seamless, economical speed. Oya’s ethos may also explain a roofline (lowered by 2 inches) that made me hit the top of my head on 90% of ingress/egresses. But his team succeeded. Many a shopper will leave Tesla and Kia EVs far behind on dealership lots, in dark garages, or stranded near highway charging stations.
Here, unavoidably, is where a thick and gooey layer of software frosting comes in. Just after hopping onto I-5, the car’s first urgent warning jumped onto the uppermost line of the dash display. It read, “Attention: Please Check Rear Seat,” decorated with three blood red seat-belted imps. Frowning, I checked for stowaways. Nada. As I did so, the car started dinging sternly at me with by far its most common message: “Driver Inattention Detected. Look Forward.”
Among the car’s other ploys, the rear seat challenge would play often. Should I check for puppies and Russian ninjas in the back, or keep my eyes glued to the road? Which is it?
All new 2025 Toyota Prius Prime models come standard with Toyota Safety Sense 3.0 (TSS 3.0). This suite of advanced safety features includes a Pre-Collision System with Pedestrian Detection, Full-Speed Range Dynamic Radar Cruise Control, Lane Departure Alert with Steering Assist, and an endless supply of admonitions and anxieties.
I’m not sure how they pulled it off, but Toyota duplicated, with exquisite fidelity, the experience of driving with my mom. Somehow, they shrank her and put her right into the dashboard display. She sees all. She knows all. She forgives nothing. By the time we’d hit Tacoma, I had christened it “The Nagmobile.” The software soon got its own name, too: The Nag-O-Matic. I like driver aids and safety. Just not when they’re overbearing, clumsy, and largely ineffective. Others do this much better.
To convey how fully MomSense 3.0 intrudes, I decided to try driving it insane. How about putting a can of Pepsi on the back seat? (Steady disapproval. After you park, if the can shifts an inch across a seam, the car alarm goes off.) Playing dead while driving, tongue out the side of my mouth? (Oddly, nothing special. Many others must have tried this.) Wandering between the lines? (Scolds, then claims you’ve used up your limited supply of Lane Departure Corrections.) What if you refuse to buckle your seat belt? (Increasingly fast beeps progress to a steady screech, flashing images of headless drivers. After two minutes of hysterics, it goes silent and sulks).
To me, it would be an actual improvement if the dash randomly announced, “You deserve a speeding ticket! Wait until your father gets home!” By reading the owner’s manual, you can turn a few of the most annoying things off before a longer trip, but then they all reset when you start it back up. Combining a stunning achievement with the Nag-O-Matic makes for an at times jarring, strange, and downright sad experience. Like putting a Corvette convertible on xanax and thorazine. Why?
My friend got his gray battle-axe back without a scratch. I confessed to driving it much more than intended, and to an insatiable love-hate relationship.
The constant abuse lets you know it cares. After it freaks out when you pull up too close to your mailbox, you have to take an extra joy-ride around the harbor to decompress. A little smile sneaks up and you catch yourself thinking, “I’m not emitting carbon! I’m saving The Earth.”
Valeo grabbed the key fob to leave, and said as he went out the door, “I wish there was some way to turn that damned software off.”
