Prius+ and Prius V Review

A while ago I posted a table of ranges of electric cars because I was thinking about buying a new car in the near future. Unfortunately, my old car broke down last week, so I needed a new car much earlier than anticipated.

The problem for me was that I need a car with at least seven seats. As far as I found, there are only two electric cars with this feature:

• Tesla Model X: With a price > 100k euro, this was much too expensive for me.


• Nissan NV 200: The official range of 280 km is ok, but I guess in winter the range will be shorter than that (especially here in Austria we have -10 °C for a few weeks nearly every winter), and I won't be able to reach the destinations I need to go to frequently with this, unfortunately.

So I decided to take a step below a full electric vehicle instead and am now driving this hybrid car:


It's a Prius+ (called Prius V in the US) with seven seats (strangely, the US version only has 5 seats). I now drove it for about 500 km and must say that I am positively surprised. It is strange to drive, and you need a bit of time to get used to it, but it is actually very nice and has an unbeatable fuel consumption rate. I like the electric mode especially, with which you can drive short routes silently, without the combustion engine on.
The children also like it very much, they have enough space and the 7 seats give you a lot of flexibility on where to place whom. I never drove a Toyota before, and was surprised by the unusual engineering focused displays (there are 6, in words SIX digital displays in the car, all displaying some different info), but you get used to that quickly.
Looking forward to driving this a bit more, let's see.