Prius Prime Short Test Drive Review

WOW! Toyota has just invented the perpetual motion machine.

 

i don't know enough about it to make a definitive statement. for all i know, it might be cheaper to force charge the car at 2 bucks a gallon than to plug it in at 24 cents/kwh. it's going to be fun to find out!

 

But why spend extra for the plug in if the person can't charge it from an outlet? The incentives aren't going to last forever, and EV only sections of a city aren't a very common thing.

 

Exactly. You get the incentive which you would not have to pass on when reselling later after incentives end.

 

Which would be a narrow window with a big if.
Toyota has only used a portion of their allotment of the federal tax credit; 45,000 between the Rav4 EV and PiP. At Toyota's projected 30k a year, the remaining amount may last to the introduction of the next generation. The miles a typical American will put on the car if bought now will over shadow the amount of the incentive not passed on.

So a person needs to buy a Prime closer to when the incentives will run out, and hold on to the car at least long enough that the initial depreciation isn't a bigger loss. Which brings us to the big if. The assumption for this to work is that the price of a new Prime is still around what they paid. With no other plug in for sale from Toyota, the person will be selling around the time of the next generation Prime arrives.

There will be discounts on that last year of the current generation, and going by past trends, the next gen model will start even lower. The Prime starts at over $2000 less than the PiP did. The Volt cut over $6000 off the price between the generations. So even with federal incentives gone, a new Prime will likely be lower cost than when your Prime was new. Even if that isn't so, the used Prime will be keeping against a new model that will be an improvement over it; longer range or better packaging of the battery.

I only see this working if the incentives for Toyota last into the second generation, and a person buys then.

 

But if being without charger access is a temporary state, then Charge mode really isn't a necessity.

 

It will be interesting to see if CHG mode can help with mountains ascents.

 

CHG on a never-plugged Prime in the US (where there's no such thing as ICE bans) would only make sense if it could prevent an ICE warm-up cycle the next time the car is driven, or if it's ascending a mountain fast enough to deplete the HV section of the SoC range, I'd say.

Now, I've just wondered something... Will the tax credit's impact to resale value (that AFAIK, literally every PHEV and BEV except for maybe Tesla's products has taken) affect the Liftback's resale value too?