people like to choose sides. you can perceive the tension here, even among those who don't post blatant love or hate threads.
I started that thread. Let's look at the gen 1 PiP. It's everything the regular Prius is except it has no spare tire and the rear hidden storage has been reshaped from horizontal to vertical. It's no big change except some options are missing. Toyota has a chance to start over with the redesign and what did they do? screw everything up. They raised the trunk floor and made it a 4 seater. I could live with the raised floor but I can't give up 5 seats. Toyota even said that they could do 5 seats if they beef up the structure. Why won't they? Here's their chance to design the Prius from the ground up and they still take a regular Prius and convert it to a plug in. Why not design the Prius line to meet the most difficult demand first then trickle down to the least demand. They should start with inside out, design the Prius to accommodate the extra weight and enormous space needed for the battery from the start. Converting it from plugin to regular is easier and all that battery space converts to extra storage.
agreed, the prime came as a shock to me. i thought toyota was going to find a place underneath for the larger battery. now, some are trying to tell us that people will buy it because they can preheat it whilst plugged in. say what?
Here in Minnesota, being able to safely preheat a car is a major selling point. In the winter most days don't reach a high of 30 degrees. Weeklong stretches where the temp doesn't climb above 0 degrees happen every couple of winters, and temps like that for a few days are a common occurance. We get 'black ice' caused by temps so cold that the exhaust freezes on the pavement. So yes, preheating a car while it is in your garage is a big deal.
I just read back a page or two, where questions about battery size came up. The IV Prius (I think) is the first Toyota release to use the new platform (global something). Could they possibly have been so short-sighted to not make accommodations for a larger battery? size? weight?
Toyota New Global Architecture (TNGA). As always, compromises have to be made. If the chassis was made heavier/strong to accommodate a larger battery, then the regular Prius' mpg will suffer cause it's carrying around extra weight for nothing. Or they could've put a 6 or 7 kWh battery instead and have a flat floor but maybe they thought 2x capacity will result in a bigger marketing point or perhaps they figured this is as much as potential owners will tolerate in terms of increased AER vs. raised floor height.
As far as I can see, the TNGA platform for Prius Gen4 gives almost the exact same total interior ft3 as the Gen3 non-TNGA platform. So that seems to be the initial TNGA design basis for Prius. Total Reported EPA Interior Vol ft3 Gen3: 115.3 ft3 (presumably this excludes 3-ft3 under false floor) so + 3-ft3 = 118.3-ft3 Gen4: (w/ spare tire) 117.7-ft3 Possibly Gen4 is even a tiny bit smaller inside than the Gen3...not sure. But then, for Gen4, Toyota wanted to shift space out of the rear to lower the back roof line to make it look more like a sedan. Presumably this means a little more passenger space over Gen3, but I have not figured out exactly where yet. Meanwhile the Gen4 style shift made it harder to graciously convert Gen4 to plug-in with less space in back. Sort of the whole concept of HEV Gen4 is to move the hybrid batt under the rear seat, which allows downsizing the back hatch vol and lowering the roof line. Nothing in that equation makes PHEV conversion as seamless as PiP1, not to mention 2x batt size. Basically, given the Gen4 style changes, we would have expected a whole new (bigger) vehicle for the Prime.
wjtracc said in part: "Toyota wanted to shift space out of the rear to lower the back roof line to make it look more like a sedan." Meanwhile the Gen4 style shift made it harder to graciously convert Gen4 to plug-in with less space in back." I'll take your word for it, but as for my taste, Toyota moved in the wrong direction. One of my objections to the G4 is the side profile. Lowering the rear head room to make it appear more like a sedan doesn't work for me.
Except it didn't. Headroom remains the same on paper and functionally, headroom increased. Allow me to explain. In the Gen 3, the ceiling cut out is slightly ahead of the rear headrest. This means, if you sit, resting against the seatback with your head against the rear headrest, you may brush the ceiling but if you lean slightly forward, you're under that cutout and have about an inch more room. In the Gen 4, that cutout is moved such that it sits right over your head when you lean against the headrest. The ceiling dips behind the headrest so you have extra room.
