Toyota Just Showed Off The New Prius And Already It's a Hit, We Guess

Aaron Cole
by Aaron Cole

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.













Aaron Cole
Aaron Cole

More by Aaron Cole

Comments
Join the conversation
2 of 79 comments
  • Ponchoman49 Ponchoman49 on Sep 10, 2015

    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!

  • 05lgt 05lgt on Sep 10, 2015

    Who let thier halfwit teenage son design the taillights? I'm not looking forward to being stuck in traffic behind one of these.

  • Kwik_Shift_Pro4X Thankfully I don't have to deal with GDI issues in my Frontier. These cleaners should do well for me if I win.
  • Theflyersfan Serious answer time...Honda used to stand for excellence in auto engineering. Their first main claim to fame was the CVCC (we don't need a catalytic converter!) engine and it sent from there. Their suspensions, their VTEC engines, slick manual transmissions, even a stowing minivan seat, all theirs. But I think they've been coasting a bit lately. Yes, the Civic Type-R has a powerful small engine, but the Honda of old would have found a way to get more revs out of it and make it feel like an i-VTEC engine of old instead of any old turbo engine that can be found in a multitude of performance small cars. Their 1.5L turbo-4...well...have they ever figured out the oil dilution problems? Very un-Honda-like. Paint issues that still linger. Cheaper feeling interior trim. All things that fly in the face of what Honda once was. The only thing that they seem to have kept have been the sales staff that treat you with utter contempt for daring to walk into their inner sanctum and wanting a deal on something that isn't a bare-bones CR-V. So Honda, beat the rest of your Japanese and Korean rivals, and plug-in hybridize everything. If you want a relatively (in an engineering way) easy way to get ahead of the curve, raise the CAFE score, and have a major point to advertise, and be able to sell to those who can't plug in easily, sell them on something that will get, for example, 35% better mileage, plug in when you get a chance, and drives like a Honda. Bring back some of the engineering skills that Honda once stood for. And then start introducing a portfolio of EVs once people are more comfortable with the idea of plugging in. People seeing that they can easily use an EV for their daily errands with the gas engine never starting will eventually sell them on a future EV because that range anxiety will be lessened. The all EV leap is still a bridge too far, especially as recent sales numbers have shown. Baby steps. That's how you win people over.
  • Theflyersfan If this saves (or delays) an expensive carbon brushing off of the valves down the road, I'll take a case. I understand that can be a very expensive bit of scheduled maintenance.
  • Zipper69 A Mini should have 2 doors and 4 cylinders and tires the size of dinner plates.All else is puffery.
  • Theflyersfan Just in time for the weekend!!! Usual suspects A: All EVs are evil golf carts, spewing nothing but virtue signaling about saving the earth, all the while hacking the limbs off of small kids in Africa, money losing pits of despair that no buyer would ever need and anyone that buys one is a raging moron with no brains and the automakers who make them want to go bankrupt.(Source: all of the comments on every EV article here posted over the years)Usual suspects B: All EVs are powered by unicorns and lollypops with no pollution, drive like dreams, all drivers don't mind stopping for hours on end, eating trays of fast food at every rest stop waiting for charges, save the world by using no gas and batteries are friendly to everyone, bugs included. Everyone should torch their ICE cars now and buy a Tesla or Bolt post haste.(Source: all of the comments on every EV article here posted over the years)Or those in the middle: Maybe one of these days, when the charging infrastructure is better, or there are more options that don't cost as much, one will be considered as part of a rational decision based on driving needs, purchasing costs environmental impact, total cost of ownership, and ease of charging.(Source: many on this site who don't jump on TTAC the split second an EV article appears and lives to trash everyone who is a fan of EVs.)
Next