2025 Toyota Prius AWD: Regular Car Reviews

[00:03] Coming through the mirage of blob shapes and AI slop emerges the last car anybody thought would get a glow up. The fifth gen Prius or XW60 if you want to sound

[00:15] cool is the first Prius that's making no attempt to look cool or different. This is the first Prius that looks good and it looks good because it's not really trying to look good. It finally hit the nerve. And the way they're doing it is

[00:32] to embrace what I call transcendental design. The windshield is a steep rake. It rakes down to the hood to a sharp nose and out back a short rear deck.

[00:45] This is the fundamental side profile of automotive beauty. It's not daring or revolutionary, but when executed well audiences applaud. It's four four time

[00:58] and a blues based rock song. Everybody knows it, but when you nail it, the world will still high five you. Cold hard bee by Jet, no sugar tonight, new mother nature by The Guess Who, never been a reason by Head East, hair of the

[01:14] dog by Nazareth, gen one Mustang, Hyundai Genesis, gen one Toyota Celica, shout out Sarah and tuned. See, this side profile is simultaneously classic and eternally youthful. And it's odd to me that Toyota the same company that

[01:31] me that Toyota the same company that made the Supra, MR2, Celica, and Chaser made the Supra, MR2, Celica, and Chaser took 26 years to take the glasses off Michael Cera in the Phoenician scheme. Today's episode of Regular Car Reviews

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[03:40] Who'd have thought they could make microwave carrots taste this good. Thank for sticking with Regular Car Reviews all these years. It really means a lot. black car? >> No.

[03:53] >> New engine? >> Not really. It's the same Toyota mess of wires and hoses that you're used to seeing under the hood. All US Priuses get the M204-FXS

[04:09] All-wheel drive is optional. Power figures vary depending on outfit, but you can expect 190 horsepower combined between the 150 horsepower engine and the 40 horsepower electric motor. It has an EV mode where it's supposed to run

[04:24] off its electric motor, but if you press on the accelerator pedal with any toe larger than your pinky, the engine turns on. Or if you go faster than 20 or 20 5 mph, the engine turns on. Or if you get creatine splat farts, the engine turns

[04:38] on. Or if the wind blows against you, the engine turns on. Or if you forget to on. Or if you think about Daniel Craig walking out of the water in Casino >> Or if your prostate vibrator that's shaped like Ed Rendell's head is set

[04:53] higher to level two. >> But here's the real genius move of the fifth generation Prius. Toyota moved the Pachinko machine gear selector from the dash where it was oriented vertically. Come on. You shift

[05:10] oriented vertically. Come on. You shift skyward to go backwards and down at an angle to go forwards? No. No. That's unintuitive for new drivers. I hear you, but you're wrong. >> What did Toyota gain by making the gear

[05:24] >> What did Toyota gain by making the gear shifter intentionally weird other than I'm the first hybrid. I'm wearing a kilt to school and I'm a guy. I'm an industry upseller.

[05:38] I skip health class and hide in the art room. >> Okay, Jeremy. Relax. By moving the shifter to the center console, The shifter to the center console, The convoluted Prius shift pattern suddenly

[05:50] makes ergonomic sense. It's no longer skyward, it's now forward for reverse skyward, it's now forward for reverse and back for drive like every automotive console shifter since 1960. There's a sport mode, but it doesn't make you go

[06:04] faster. It's just a it's just a switch that makes the Prius louder. >> Okay, electric motors and engine working together. What do you got for me?

[06:18] CVT whine. Very Toyota sound. >> And when the four-banger is revving hard, it's not the aggressive growl of a Honda or the syncopated drum solo of a Subaru. It's classic Toyota concrete

[06:35] Subaru. It's classic Toyota concrete saw, which honestly, I respect. Toyota's naturally aspirated four-cylinders sound harsh because the company never bothered to do exhaust tuning to make the engine sound passionate. No, we're just going

[06:50] to put an intake resonator on here to stop the droning, maybe another after the headers if practical, a catalytic converter for compliance, and a muffler out back. And whatever noise this makes, that's the engine's true sound. No fake

[07:05] engine sounds coming through the speakers, no adjustable baffles. This is how the engine sounds. But I like that. The Prius embraces reality. And now we The Prius embraces reality. And now we have this stupid phrase, "Hybrid

[07:18] Great. And it's an outline of the Prius's angry headlights. Oh, NO. Prius's angry headlights. Oh, NO. EVERYBODY LOOK OUT. THE PRIUS HAS ANGRY headlights now. Toyota, you're 10 years late to an automotive trend that became

[07:33] cringe in 2016. Most modern headlights have abandoned the angry head in 2020. Go look in showrooms. Go look at car headlights. They're all flat now. Flat

[07:45] difference. All headlights look like Friskers face. Now Toyota will make horizontal face designs by 2036 when automotive design will have evolved all the way to Ignignokt from Aqua Teen

[08:00] Hunger Force. The steering wheel and dash continues the theme from the all electric bZ4X. The rear seats are still Uber lift hard. You sit back here and the first thing you will think is oh, well, I hope my Uber driver isn't crazy.

[08:16] >> Capital One, how much is in your wallet? >> These rear seats are hard. Try to fart in them and they'll send your taco bubbles back up into your lower intestine where they level up into sky

[08:29] trumpets. Logitech, we make the cameras you bust in front of we make the cameras you bust in front of because solos pay more than DoorDash. >> The Toyota don't call it a comeback Prius drives like a Corolla now, not

[08:44] like a GTA 4 car in the beginning of the game. The power steering in old Priuses was over boosted. They didn't really get heavier at higher speeds, especially for a medium size car, which accounts for why second and third gen Priuses always

[08:58] appeared to swerve all over the road. They had super touchy steering. Same deal with the brakes. Now the brakes on this fifth gen Prius feel like normal brakes. Not the old way the Prius I brakes behaved, which was small bite on

[09:14] the initial pedal press, that's your regen kicking in, and then as you press the brake further down, there's a sliver of nothing, almost like you have air in the lines, and then here come the mechanical brakes. The

[09:28] original Prius and also the second generation one were from a simpler time when people collected Beanie Babies instead of abusive exes. But this here, the fifth gen, this is the Prius the moment demands. A glow-up that screams,

[09:41] "I'm in shape now, but I don't know how to use it to enforce my will." The Prius Prime is a Prius that doesn't thrift shop anymore. It's done with all its criticisms. It's fed up. Like a parent whose kid comes to them the night before

[09:55] projects due and swears the teacher just assigned it. This is the Prius who strikes back through sheer competency because competence is the new You don't have to be fast as long as you're quick. You don't have to be

[10:09] cosmetically appealing, you just have to be different than what you were. Even if the change is superficial and mostly lateral. 2025 Toyota Prius Prime Limited, it's good enough. Now, in this particular Prius, you have the dual

[10:23] particular Prius, you have the dual motor all-wheel drive M20A-FXS. motor all-wheel drive M20A-FXS. It's a 2 L and classified as a high-efficiency vehicle. But, if you get the plug-in one, you get 220 horsepower

[10:36] combined. Now, this isn't that, but either way, the package is tied together either way, the package is tied together with a planetary gear set eCVT with a EPA electric range around 44 mi. Good luck getting that cuz really what's

[10:51] driving this Prius, it's going to run on electric power to the end of the parking you're going to go faster and the engine kicks on. And you get fuel economy which will top out around 52 mi per gallon. Now, in order to do that, you have to

[11:05] Now, in order to do that, you have to drive slow. Very slow acceleration. Try to do everything you can to keep that engine from turning on. Now, the base engine from turning on. Now, the base MSRP is roughly $29,375.

[11:17] I mean, dealer markups maybe around 32. And this is interesting, you could for under $35,000. The first-generation Prius was looked at as kind of an oddity, and the second-generation Prius was just

[11:31] lampooned and made fun of. South Park had a whole episode about people driving these things and pretending they're better than everybody. But now we're in better than everybody. But now we're in the age of luxury EVs and a Prius now

[11:44] has just become a normal car. A Prius no longer makes you look like the type of person who plays their own music at the gym through their phone with the speaker on or the type of person furry or otherwise who goes to a convention with

[11:57] a Bluetooth speaker in their backpack cranked. And all the car had to do was start dressing in clothes from someplace other than Ollie's Bargain Outlet. Congratulations, you went to H&M. The driving experience is now just a normal

[12:12] car, which is also strange because the Prius was always like the unique hybrid. But Toyota always made other hybrids in the line. They have the Camry Hybrid and the Corolla Hybrid. Can't remember if the Avalon was offered as a hybrid. But

[12:25] the Corolla Hybrid was always the plain Prius cuz it had pretty much all the same parts, but it just looked like a Corolla. And now the Prius is doing the same thing. It's becoming much more simplistic in its design. Perhaps the

[12:39] simplistic in its design. Perhaps the Corolla Hybrid was the test bed for this fifth gen Prius. Would people accept a hybrid that doesn't pat you on the back? of the ownership experience. And it doesn't sound like Toyota has gotten

[12:54] department. It's almost as if they're still employing their rope-a-dope strategy of letting other companies take all the risks before committing sophisticated, something less glitchy. I

[13:07] mean, Toyota isn't really incentivized to change entirely, not when consistency is part of their appeal. They're Rick Flair and Ricky Steamboat in the '80s going from town to town doing variations on the same match every single night and

[13:20] making bank. It's almost unfair. Why doesn't Toyota have to change? They They shouldn't get to do nothing and stay number one. They should have to try and do something. So so why don't they? Well, because they did all their trying

[13:33] years ago. Toyota is the automotive equivalent of a content creator who can just talk into the camera for 8 minutes and do a million views in an afternoon while everybody else has to spend 3 hours deciding between thumbnails. But

[13:45] back to build quality. For the most part, the Prius is still good, but I would expect better quality than this has here. For instance, Bailey has owned this since last July, but had to jump this thing twice. Yes, jump-start a

[13:59] hybrid because the lead-acid battery, the regular car battery, keeps dying when it gets cold. The car is doing something and there's parasitic loss. We did have a colder-than-average winter this year and 20° days stuck around

[14:14] quite a bit. But ignoring the battery issues, it feels like Toyota still hasn't solved tech integration just yet. It's still lagging behind. The pedestrian detection system is more overtuned than a tavern piano in the Old

[14:27] West, and the seats apparently aren't calibrated from the factory. The dealerships have to do it, but some of them just don't. And the seat adjustment them just don't. And the seat adjustment settings won't work until the seat is

[14:41] calibrated? So you have to do this sort of, you know, up up down down left right left right B A select start Konami code to make them work, and then you're good to go. But even then, only the driver's seat is power adjustable for 2025. I

[14:55] mean, I can kind of understand it being a car under $35,000, but another odd thing. When you turn the car on, Spotify will play on and off for 2 seconds and then turn off again. This is despite Bailey disabling autoplay. So the car

[15:09] shouldn't have to be doing this, and I'm not sure why it is. Granted, it's not like it was obnoxious enough to derail the experience, but it does fit into an overall theme of the Prius that comfort and technology aren't

[15:21] priorities because that's never been what the Prius is here to do. It's here to get good miles per good miles per gallon and say, "Hey, the future is This is just a normal car. So, can you please just do normal car things? Prius

[15:34] spent the better part of its lifetime as a car that needed to be defended. Not in the same way you're going to defend buying a Cybertruck, but probably the same way you need to defend using Ozempic. Some people legitimately need

[15:47] it and others just use it because it's trendy or because they think it's a shortcut to a glow-up that allows them to present to the world or present the same image of themselves to the world that has existed in their own mind for

[16:00] Same deal. Some people get the Prius because they legitimately needed one, was trendy. And the people who defended their choice either defended it on personal grounds or on the broader premise that the Prius represented a

[16:15] direction society needed to go. The I'm driving a Prius because eventually everybody's going to be driving a Prius or something like it. People who got in on the ground floor had to defend that choice to everyone who called this a car

[16:27] for childless adults who try to order from a kids menu at a sit-down restaurant. Or the type of attitude that Prius has got in the early days in small infectious what you think you're better than me? If you allow me a slight rant

[16:42] for just a second, that's the attitude I'm so happy I escaped from small towns, a bunch of limited small-minded people all pointing at each other saying, "What they all circle the sandbox that's filled with cat poop. Anyway, yes, the

[16:56] Prius Prime is a sort of post-modern Prius. It's a Prius that vindicates its forefathers by rejecting the need for a defense because it no longer is trendy. And I don't know that it's necessarily the best Prius that has ever been. The

[17:09] second-generation one set the trends and the second-generation may have been the best one, but you just Finally, they moved the shifter to the correct place remember I'm doing Prius shifting. I can do normal car stuff. Prius, it's a

[17:25] normal car. But, now the Prius no longer represents a weird future or even the represents a weird future or even the future at all. It's just present, warts being the best version of Prius to exist, but by virtue of being so

[17:38] crushingly normal that it no longer requires any kind of justification.