The new normal

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This article was published 30/08/2024 (399 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

While some carmakers are diving head first into battery electric vehicles, Toyota seems content to merely dip its toes.

The company continues to offer just one fully electric vehicle in Canada — the joint-venture vehicle Toyota calls the BZ4X and Subaru calls Solterra — but offers partial electrification in every segment it plays.

The full-size Tundra, the returning off-road icon Land Cruiser, the compact Corolla and almost every vehicle in between is offered with some form of a hybrid powertrain. Some models, such as the RAV4 Prime and Prius Prime, are plug-in hybrids that for some drivers may never burn a single molecule of gasoline. (While that may be true for driving, plug-in hybrids are programmed to fire up the gas engine periodically just to keep everything lubed, primed and ready to run.)

The only vehicles that don’t have some form of electrification available are the Supra, 4Runner, Corolla Hatchback GR Corolla and GR86. That may just be a case of “watch this space,” but Toyota doesn’t comment on future models.

There is, it must be said, an inescapable logic to Toyota’s strategy, proven as sales growth of pure EVs starts to slow.

Today’s subject, the 2024 Toyota Prius, is the latest in a line of vehicles dating back to 1998. It has become considerably less geeky, more powerful and more efficient over those 26 years.

For most of its existence the fact Prius was different was shouted from the rooftops, from its unconventional body style to its futuristic interior to its odd but successful switch-by-wire transmission control lever.

Contrast that to its current iteration, which looks perfectly, well, normal. The body is a sleek, almost sedan-like shape but with a rear hatch that opens wide.

The interior could pass for a Corolla, now with only the hybrid gauges on the instrument panel to belie the car’s hybrid nature.

The transmission lever works the same way, but now sticks out of the console and looks like most automatic transmission levers, even if the shift pattern remains Prius-esque. By that, I mean you pull it left and forward for reverse, and left and backward for drive. You push P to put it in Park.

The design almost seems to say Toyota has decided its Prius customers no longer wish to wear their fuel-saving badges on their sleeves.

The basic architecture of the Hybrid Synergy Drive remains: a four-cylinder Atkinson-cycle motor drives one input of a planetary gearset continuously variable transmission while a powerful electric motor-generator drives another.

Through the wizardry that is planetary gearset transmissions, the gearbox blends all-gas, all-electric and a mixture of the two for propulsion, diverts some gas-engine power into charging the drive battery when needed and provides regenerative charging when the vehicle decelerates.

The powertrain is what’s known as a parallel hybrid, which can run for short duration in EV mode, and can also run, when needed, as just a gas-powered car.

My driving partner, New Jersey-based auto123.com writer Chris Chin, and I drove the Prius as part of Toyota Canada’s 60th anniversary cross-country drive. Our time in the Prius was spent on the roads between Oshawa and Waterloo, Ont.

We found the car to be very powerful, very quiet and in some ways, seemingly superior to the Toyota Crown Signia we had driven from Montreal to Oshawa. The Prius seats were more comfortable, particularly given Chris and I are fairly broad in the shoulders. We found the Crown Signia to be a bit louder with road noise and wind noise, though any criticism of the Signia comes with the caveat that the one we drove was a pre-production unit and “may not reflect final production quality,” according to a sticker on the dash.

(The Crown Signia is the bigger brother to the rather large Crown sedan. It replaces the Venza in the lineup and, like the Venza, is only offered as a hybrid.)

Prius pricing starts a touch more than $41,000, which means it’s still not an option for drivers seeking lowest overall cost of ownership, but its content level is competitive with other cars in that snack bracket. It’s also not the least expensive hybrid in Toyota’s lineup anymore. That honour goes to the Corolla hybrid at $33,000 and change.

Toyota’s electrification strategy seems to be a tacit admission that the world isn’t ready for EVs just yet. Hybrids offer the best of both worlds: fuel-sipping and powerful, with a gas engine ready to cover off longer trips that could still be problematic in some parts of Canada for EVs.

More charging, longer range and batteries that aren’t as affected by cold are key to improving EV uptake. Toyota said during one stop on our journey it’s continuing to invest in development of solid-state batteries, with plans to bring them to market in 2028.

Solid-state batteries should, physics suggest, reduce or eliminate the impact of cold weather on driving range: today’s batteries all use liquid electrolytes, and cold weather changes the viscosity of that liquid, slowing down electron flow inside the battery and reducing range. As the name suggests, solid-state batteries use solid electrolytes.

kelly.taylor@winnipegfreepress.com