I was wrong about the Prius

I disliked the original Toyota Prius on a cellular level. I also confess I’ve never driven one, and my only experience of them has been sitting in the back seat trying not to catch whatever the many thousands of previous occupants in various states of disrepair may have infected it with.

I do, however, admire Toyota’s faultless engineering: despite the Prius being one of the first mass-produced hybrids and heading for 30 years old now, many are still running round with hundreds of thousands of miles on their odometers. I also respect the use of a Kamm tail (no doubt inspired by the Ferrari 250 GTO) on the second generation to drop the coefficient of drag from an already slippery 0.29 to an estate agent-esque 0.26 and then politician-grade 0.25 with the third generation. They’re clever cars and, on an engineering level, a watershed product.

No, my utter distaste for the original Prius came from the way it was paraded round as a virtue-signalling, four-wheeled means of saving the environment, curing pollution and probably solving world peace – all through the good offices of a pitifully small 1.8kWh battery. I thought they were pointless and inefficient: you’re always carrying round two heavy and expensive powertrains, and typically only using one.