Toyota Prius review

All depends on the context, doesn’t it? If you’re comparing the new Prius to the old one then the design has come on leaps and bounds, with far fewer horrible plastics and a vastly improved digital offering.

But if you look at what other manufacturers are doing with £40k-ish cars at the moment, then you’ll be more critical of the Prius’s cabin. There are elements (the centre console, the steering wheel, the door cards) that look a little low rent, still. And but for a strip of ambient lighting across the lower part of the dash, everything is monochrome. There’s not much in here that’ll lift your mood.

Talk me through the set-up.

All pretty conventional. You get a multi-function steering wheel that adjusts for height and reach, and the instrument display is a seven-inch unit that shows speed, charge, regen status, driving mode, the speed limit, and any warnings that ping up. There’s a lot crammed into a small space, but you get used to it.

The central touchscreen is a 12.3in display and it runs the same Toyota Smart Connect+ system that we’ve come across in other Toyotas recently: it’s a step on from the truly awful and outdated interface that the company used to deploy, but there are still lots of shortcomings that put it behind rival systems.

Although the graphics and screens are sharp and reasonably responsive, you often run into dead ends on the menus and some pages look underpopulated. Looking for the screen to turn the speed limit warning off? That’s a steering wheel job. Saved you several fruitless minutes of jabbing there.

Luckily there’s still a bank of physical switchgear for the climate controls. Oft overlooked, these days.

You’re going to tell me that the battery eats into boot space, aren’t you?

We are. The Prius manages just 284 litres of boot capacity, which is… 80 litres down on what the old Prius plug-in could manage. Progress, eh? There’s nothing particularly impractical about the space, other than there being a slight load lip. There’s just… not a huge amount of room. The flimsy parcel shelf is for hiding your stuff from view: you can’t plonk anything on top of it.

Space up front for driver and passenger is good, and there’s a fair amount of legroom in the rear. Uber passengers of the future: we can’t yet comment on the comfort back here, as our only experience thus far entailed being flung around on track by The Stig. Headroom’s a bit tight though on account of that sloping roofline. Call it the price you pay for fashion.

The Prius isn’t rated for towing.