For at least 12 months, the Handy Toyota blog you know and love so much has been throwing new versions of the Prius, dubbed the Prii family, down your throat.  The Prius 5, the Prius v, the Prius c, and of course the Prius Plug-in are generally about 10% of what our staff, by which I mean me mostly, blog about.  And why not?  The next evolution of the world's favorite, most loved, and best received hybrid vehicle?  Who wearing a Toyota emblem on their breast wouldn't be jazzed about such an occasion?

But along with all these blogs one thing has surely become abundantly clear to you folks:  it's all conjecture.  Will it work, how does it work, what's the mileage, what kind of cost are we looking at are all questions we know you've pondered or asked aloud whilst in our St. Albans, VT Toyota dealership, and today I'm happy to tell you I have some firsthand knowledge that may answer some burning questions.

For the better of the week ending Sunday, November 6, 2011, Toyota Motors hosted a "Ride and Drive" event at the University Mall on Dorset Street in South Burlington, VT, giving folks the chance to not only ride in a Prius Plug-in but, as the name implies, drive one (assuming you have a clean, valid driver's license and are willing to sign a liability form).  Strictly playing consumer for the day I did just that.

I reiterate:  I did not attend the Ride and Drive as a Toyota employee.  I was treated the same as any other attendee would be, so I am only divulging non-privileged information.  With that said, here are a few features I think you're going to love.

Green leather
This probably sounds like a pretty flagrant use of an oxymoron, doesn't it?  Well that's what I thought at first too.  It turns out, Toyota's eco-friendly and/or green consciousness doesn't end with the amazing Hybrid Synergy Drive platform anymore.  Adding to superlative green initiatives like the Prius v's use of the new GreenEdge sound system from JBL, Toyota has manufactured a new form of "leather" seating that isn't real leather at all.

Now before you say it, no it is not pleather, which for those of you who don't know is a cheap, fake type of material that feels and looks similar to leather.  The green leather Toyota has fabricated is a whole new material that actually has a supple, almost squishy or stretchy feel to it while retaining the nice leather feel.  As it was put to me, "no cows were hurt to make this 'leather.'"  So vegans, vegetarians, strict Buddhists, Hindus, animal lovers, or any other group that abhors the endangerment of animals for which I'm ignorant:  rejoice.  You can now have leather without feeling guilty or breaking a single rule.

EV, Normal, and Power modes
We have gone over this in previous blogs, and in fact this feature is being used in the all new Prius v.  Using these three modes, you can effectively choose the way you want your Prius Plug-in to operate.

Coming up on a steep hill a mile ahead?  Hit the Power mode to fire up the gasoline engine to gain a little speed (all the while keeping in the Prius-like high 40-mpg range).  Doing some simple, city driving?  Make sure you're in EV mode and you won't use a drop of gasoline for 13 or more miles.  Finally, normal mode basically operates like a current generation Prius, the only difference being that this still is an EV.  As such, a Normal mode driver will benefit from exemplary regenerative braking, electric engine driving when driving under 25 miles per hour, gasoline engine-powered battery recharge, and essentially get the best of both worlds.

Luminescent readouts on the windshield
For those of you who shop for new cars on our sister website, handychevy.com, you may have noticed that many Camaro models come with a luminescent speedometer and tachometer.  If you have never seen this gadget it's basically an LED projection onto your windshield that shows your speed digitally.  This is a great tool for keeping one's eyes on the road at all times, but it serves and even greater  purpose for new Prius owners who may not be used to the Prius' speedometer location in the center console.

So what else is so neat about this?  Well in and of itself it's pretty excellent, but the Prius Plug-in takes this a step further and adds in navigation and battery power projections.  When equipped, this means you can now take your eyes off the road for two less reasons altogether - and these three reasons are pretty much the only reason you ever need to!  Navigating down an unknown road and while waiting for a left turn to approach on the map usually equates to staring at the LCD screen every couple of minutes, but this alleviates that issue.  On top of speed and navigation information, the projection also gives indicators as to how well you are maximizing the EV's battery power via an abbreviated "flow of energy" display many Prius vehicles have had for years.

As an added bonus, this luminescent speedometer and battery meter is slightly customizable.  Using a simple control button next to the shifter, you can move the gauge's projection up, down, left, and right, as well as adjust the brightness.  I'm sure this will come in handy plenty for taller and shorter folks as well as night and day scenarios.

Technology comes standard
This is kind of a trend in Toyota vehicles today (and a great/necessary one at that), but the Prius Plug-in comes with a variety of standard features that are upgrades on many other makes and even other Toyota models.  Touch screen navigation, Bluetooth connectivity, the Entune smartphone application system, and (sources say) a backup camera (this isn't confirmed as of the time this article is published) all comes in the initial package.

What's the cost to drive?
As mentioned on our Prius Plug-in information page, this is a hard concept to nail down.  Due to fluctuating rates amongst utility providers, times of the year, and different people and their driving habits, there are many permutations that will show very different results.

For some clarification and a ballpark estimate I spoke with a gentleman who lives on the outskirts of the Washington D.C. metropolitan area.  Keep in mind that power is likely more per kilowatt hour in the D.C. area than it is in rural St. Albans or even Burlington, VT.  He calculated a month without the Prius Plug-in charging from his house (which again charges from a simple, 120-volt house outlet), calculated the kilowatt hour usage after a billing cycle with the Prius Plug-in, and did the math accordingly based on the kWh charge.

Keep in mind once more that THIS IS BY NO MEANS A GUARANTEE, however the cost he uncovered was 45 cents for each 13-mile charge.  In other words you could THEORETICALLY charge the Prius Plug-in eight times, drive 104 miles within those eight charges, and have paid the same in electricity as you would have one gallon of gas at $3.60 per gallon.

Take a look at that figure:  that's 104 miles, or two rounds of - you guessed it - 52 miles, the current generation Prius' highest fuel economy rating per gallon.  Not too shabby, eh?

Charging stations
One thing I have been kept in the dark, or rather should I say mislead about was the aesthetics of the charging stations.  If you keep tabs on our Facebook and Twitter streams or subscribe to our blog you may have noticed a blog about Leviton, a supplier of electronic apparatuses, won Toyota's bid for charging stations.  Having read the blog in question, you might have seen a large, gas pump-looking charging station shown in the press materials.  This is what I (and likely many others) thought the charging station was - that is the entire unit.  I was wrong.

The upgraded 220-volt charger from Leviton that allows the Prius Plug-in's battery to refill after only an hour and a half is about the size of a briefcase, or maybe even a half thereof volume-wise.  It gets mounted to the wall, plugged in, and you're ready to go.

The charging indicator
In today's technological world, folks claim that batteries don't hold a "memory." In years past, rechargeable batteries, such as those you would have found in an early 1990s mobile phone, would "remember" the amount of juice they could hold based on your charging habits.  For example, if you were to plug your phone in at night when it still had 20% of its life and charge it until only 90%, over time the battery would learn this and only hold that 70% charge while calling itself full.  This is due to the chemical composition of battery's ions (today lithium and nickel usually) very literally learning their own capacities coupled with a finite lifespan.  Conversely you could essentially burn out older rechargeable and mobile batteries by plugging the unit into a power source and charging past 100% for long periods of time.

Modern batteries are said to not have this property, and it's considered okay to make the following faux pas of the past.  For the most part this is bologna.  My iPhone doesn't get charged as it should be from empty to full and depleted thusly, and I've noticed a serious decline in battery life over the past year or more.  Granted it's nowhere near as severe, but suffice to say this still occurs.

To accommodate this phenomenon (which is really more a chemical and scientific equation than phenomenon as pointed out above), the Prius Plug-in has a simple LED indicator on the "fuel tank," by which I mean the outlet.  When the light is on, your Plug-in is charging; when it's off, the Prius PHV is powered up.  It's that simple, and it takes the guess work out of the situation.  Don't forget that Toyota has been dishing out a severely impressive hybrid vehicle warranty for batteries either:  the Prius Plug-in will be no different, holding a seven-year/150,000 mile hybrid battery warranty, one to four years past the average vehicle ownership timeframe.

The A/C button
What do you think an A/C button found on the key fob (the keyless entry remote) would do?  I would assume it turns on the air conditioning, wouldn't you?  Again, I was wrong.

A/C stands for "accessories," and this is a neat trick.  The morning of the Ride and Drive, (November 5, 2011) my 2011 Toyota Corolla Sport was COVERED in a thin film of VT winter frost.  I had to go out, start my car, and turn the heat on because I had turned it down the previous evening.  If I owned a Prius Plug-in I could have avoided this or similar situations.

Imagine you own a Prius PHV and you know the next day is going to be a scorcher.  After you park your car for the evening, you crank up your air conditioner and turn the car off.  The next morning you point the remote out the door, click the A/C button on the remote, and it activates - you guessed it again - the accessories!  So instead of waiting the five or more minutes for the air conditioner to fully chill your car's cabin you can then get into a nice cool car.  And of course, the same applies for the wintertime example above.  Assuming you preset the accessories the night before (or whatever the timeframe may be - from morning to night if you will), you just hit the button and wait a few seconds.

When I thought about this, the first question that popped up in my head was "with no timer, how does this work?"  Then it dawned on me:  because of the electric engine of course!  Instead of having the auto start feature, you only need to "ignite" the electric components!  What an ingenious use of the battery power that is presumably charged and ready to go!

Driving impressions
I'm sure most of you skimmed, searched for, or jumped right to this section and I don't blame you.  I do, however, have to disappoint you... slightly.  I'll tell you what the vehicle's like, but to summarize I'll tell you this:  it's the SAME.  That's right.  I drive Prii a LOT, and I didn't notice HARDLY a thing.  This isn't to say nothing's different, though.

One of my favorite features occurred when I turned the car off.  Looking at the high, middle console screen (up on the dashboard area), the Plug-in gave me an estimated fuel economy for the trip:  about 1.3 miles, 9.97% battery power used up, and 99.99 miles per gallon.  The miles per gallon measurement is based off a new measure which is actually based off gallons of gas and electric power consumption, and since I had used only electric it measured the highest possible readout of 99.99 mpg.  Realistically my miles per gallon rating for the trip was infinite since the "G" in mpg means gallons, and zero gallons were used (or conversely the fraction is undefined as one cannot divide by zero, but we'll leave the geek talk at that...).

Steering felt truly phenomenal, and I dare say it handled even more tightly than a current Prius, albeit not in a better or worse way necessarily.  It just had more rigid than feel than, for example, my Corolla, but not as loose the current Prius.  It was a good middle ground, and perhaps reflected the heavier weight of the Prius Plug-in overall.  Though I didn't get to really jostle the car from left to right in a slalom fashion, I will say the turns I took felt sporty yet refined and perfectly Prius hybrid!

As for acceleration, there is nary a hiccup in the system.  I didn't even hear the engine turn on once while driving in EV mode, but once I flipped the switch and entered Power mode it came alive just fine - it's loud by comparison, by still quieter than my Corolla and just what you'd expect from the Prius namesake.  Whether in EV mode, Normal mode, or Power mode, on the flat terrain I was on (sadly I didn't get to hit a hill and truly put Power mode to the test), acceleration was smooth, even, and tremendously responsive.  Don't let the EV moniker fool you - when you need power, it's all there at once, which is one of the items people seem to not realize and/or forget about these electric vehicles.  Unlike a gasoline combustion engine, the electric car doesn't need to burn fuel to generate power.  The electricity is always flowing, and as soon as your foot tells the pedal to tell the engine to feed the power, it's there.  This is why electric cars have seemingly 100% torque right up front; something a gas engine can't compete with.

I will say one big difference was the braking.  I'm not sure if it was because of the regenerative braking (which if you'll remember adds energy to the battery as you create friction between the brake pads and the rotor), but a light tap on the brakes almost feels like I'm jamming the brakes on my Corolla.  It took a second to get used to, but by the time I was done my drive, and again this was only 1.3 miles, I had the hang of it and loved the braking.  It really makes you feel safe, and I'm not sure why exactly - I guess in the end I felt like I had more control over the car, odd though that is, and this is something I really, really enjoyed.

Obviously in the end I was impressed, coming away with a bevy of answered questions and new ones to boot.  I for one cannot wait to get some extended time with a delivered model when this spring 2012 hits and we get one here at Handy Toyota of St. Albans, VT.  If you're in the same boat, hurry and sign up today!  The Priority Registration form closes soon and only those who sign up will be eligible to buy the first batch of Prius Plug-in's when they're released.  Vermont IS one of only 14 launch states so we'll be able to get them for you as soon as they release, but it's imperative that you sign up!

For more on the Prius Plug-in, check out our information page or view previous blogs full of questions, answers, speculation, and more.  You can also send us an email with any questions, concerns, or order inquiries you may have.

Chris Dugan
Handy Toyota
St. Albans, VT  05478