Toyota Just Showed Off The New Prius And Already It's a Hit, We Guess
On Tuesday night, Toyota dropped the new Prius from the sky in Las Vegas in front of journalists (we guess our invite got lost in the mail, Toyota?), “social influencers” and bartenders, because most of them had already seen the leaked photos that you have too.
The 2016 Prius is a little Mirai, a little Corolla and a whole lot of vague right now. Toyota didn’t detail any of the car’s official specs or price, but according to CarNewsChina the 1.8-liter four-cylinder engine and electrons in the back combine for 150 horsepower and will propel the car up to 60 mpg. According to the report, the Prius will also travel up to 34 miles on electricity alone.
Even though the car won’t go on sale until early next year, Toyota is ramping up production at its plant with “unprecedented” levels of overtime.
The new Prius, which will be built on Toyota’s new global TNGA framework, will be 2.5 inches longer, 0.6 inches lower and 0.8 wider than the outgoing model. The Prius will also use a double wishbone suspension setup in the back instead of the last generation’s torsion beam to wake up some of the number handling aspects of the outgoing model.
Of course, how the thing looks is probably the biggest difference over last year. Toyota says the roof has been lowered and the Prius’s signature bump has been moved forward to drop the rear of the hatch further and faster. The floating roof is accentuated by the blacked out rear pillar and presumably 120,000 man-hours went into shaping the curves around the headlights.
The Prius will be the first car built on Toyota’s TNGA architecture. It’s likely that a compact hybrid crossover will be built on the same framework too.
More by Aaron Cole
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looks like a whole lot of hideous to me. The fact that these blights will be all over the roads by next year is indeed a very depressing thought!
Who let thier halfwit teenage son design the taillights? I'm not looking forward to being stuck in traffic behind one of these.