2009 Toyota Prius Follow-Up Test and Video

As a gainfully employed adult living outside Mom's jurisdiction, we are not obligated to eat four servings of vegetables per day, balance our checkbook or drive hybrid cars like the 2009 Toyota Prius. However, we're not above the occasional weekend of clean living.

Asparagus isn't in season, so we're touring Southern California's freeways in a Driftwood Pearl 2009 Toyota Prius. It's beige, the color Mom would choose if her dealership ran out of Super White.

Unassuming to its core, this 2009 Prius tells us it wants to be driven just like the 2004 Toyota Prius and every Prius we've tested since. You know — gently, and with some emotional distance.

If you want emotional involvement from a 2009 Prius, you'll find it in the usual place. That would be the fuel-consumption bar graph displayed on the LCD touchscreen. In your quest for maximum mpg and maximum little green cars (indicating electricity regeneration), you ride the same moral highs and lows you'd confront in Chutes and Ladders. It's fun. Kind of.

Kinda Speedy in the City
Nothing is new inside the 2009 Toyota Prius, but we sense change in the car's adopted home world of Southern California. We see it two lanes over on U.S. 101 as another Driftwood Pearl Prius blows by at 80 mph. We frown when a Seaside Pearl Prius cuts us off during the competitive slog into general parking at Dodger Stadium. And after 250 miles of driving, we're bewildered by our inability to get more than 500 feet away from the next nearest Prius.

The Prius is everywhere, a function of surging sales that reached 181,221 last year. Maybe this Prius-on-every-corner thing only happens in Southern California, but it gives you a powerful feeling of anonymity in a car that once seemed so futuristic and left of center.

The Prius is so much a part of SoCal car culture (in its current manifestation anyway) that most other motorists are familiar with its unusual power band and make not-so-subtle adjustments to compensate.

No one bothers to challenge the 2009 Toyota Prius around town. Its electric motor's 295 pound-feet of torque from zero to 1,200 rpm allow it to get out of the hole quickly and out-coast would-be foes to the next traffic light.

Our beige hybrid is in its element on the uphill, stop-and-go climb to Chavez Ravine. While Dodger fans around us swear and fry their clutches, the placid Prius putts along smoothly, silently and odorlessly. Its specialized planetary gearset (the complicated thing that drives the car's front wheels instead of a conventional transmission) keeps it from rolling back even a little bit when starting on inclines.

Kinda Not Quick on the Highway
On the freeway, though, everyone knows we're one of the slow cars. They also suspect, with some justification, that we might be hypermilers and might wish to impose our ideals on others, perhaps by cruising 65 mph in the fast lane. They slice and dice around the Driftwood Pearl Prius, encouraging a retreat to the far right lane.

At this point, we'd need to hammer on the car's 1.5-liter engine for all it's worth to meet the challenge. This is not a bad four-cylinder engine, but on the Atkinson cycle, it makes only 76 horsepower at 5,000 rpm (yielding a cumulative total of 110 hp when combined with the electric motor) and 82 lb-ft of torque at 4,200 rpm.

There's no tachometer in the Prius, of course, so we could plead the Fifth in the event we worked the little inline-4 to death. But on most mountain passes, it simply takes too much effort to stay on the 80-mph pace. We move right to settle in at 70 mph.

We talk to some longtime, second-generation Prius owners, and several express a wish for better highway performance. "When driving from Aspen to Denver, I can't keep up with the 85-mph pace of traffic," says Steve Goldenberg, owner of a 2004 Prius with 50,000 miles. "The battery drains quickly, and the gas engine on its own can't go 85."

Whereas we might ask for a bigger gasoline engine, though, loyal Toyota Prius owners are asking for a more powerful electric motor and a more robust battery pack. And perhaps a plug-in option.

At the test track, our 2009 Toyota Prius posts nearly identical numbers to the 2008 models that went up against Toyota's Camry Hybrid and an automatic-equipped 2008 Honda Fit. It spends 10.3 seconds getting itself to 60 mph (or 10.0 seconds with 1 foot of rollout like on a drag strip) and arrives at the quarter-mile mark in 17.5 seconds at 79.6 mph.

As such, the 2009 Prius is about 1.5 seconds slower than a Camry Hybrid for the quarter-mile test, 1 second slower than a manual-shift 2009 Fit, and almost 2 seconds quicker than Honda's Civic Hybrid.

Handling and Braking Still Aren't To Taste
What keeps the 2009 Toyota Prius from driving like a normal car, though, is not its lack of speed, but its compromised handling and braking.

The Prius is not terrible. It feels lightweight because it is actually lightweight (2,987 pounds), and although it rolls plenty through corners, its low-rolling-resistance P185/65R15 Goodyear Integrity tires and watchful stability control system (included in Package 6 on our test car) put an early check on driver aggression. A slow and smooth approach gets our test car through the slalom in a respectable 62.2 mph.

But it doesn't offer the driving enjoyment you might expect in a car that costs (with options) nearly $30,000. Turn the steering wheel in preparation for a cloverleaf freeway ramp, and there's little indication through the steering wheel or the driver seat that the car is responding. This isn't a great feeling when you're strapped into a seat that isn't height-adjustable and reaching out to a small, non-telescoping steering wheel.

Braking is similarly disconcerting, as abrupt transitions between regenerative and mechanical braking (along with considerable front-end dive) force you to recalibrate your expectations of how and when a midsize car should stop. Our test car's best 60-mph-to-zero stopping distance is 131 feet.

All this condemns the 2009 Toyota Prius to a one-dimensional existence as a fuel miser. The ability of cars like the Honda Fit, Mini Cooper and even the Volkswagen Jetta TDI to meet drivers on their own terms makes them vastly more appealing alternatives to us.

Yet none of the Prius owners with whom we talk share our concern. "I've found that the handling is fine," David Vangerov, owner of an '04 Prius with 88,000 miles, tells us. "I'm not a conservative driver, but I'm not someone who wants sports-car handling out of what's essentially a commuter car."

It's the Economy, Stupid
We're skeptical when anyone dismisses all Toyota Prius owners as short-sighted attention-seekers angling for access to high-occupancy-vehicle (HOV) lanes. Those days are over. All your neighbors drive Priuses and, at least in California, the carpool lane stickers are gone.

For second-generation Prius owners, the very rational combination of 40-mpg fuel economy and space-efficient packaging is what makes the car so satisfying. "I've never had a car that could go 500 miles on a tank of gas before," says Jim Cullen, who has over 90,000 miles on his Prius. "And with its four-door hatchback configuration, this is a car that can do almost everything. There's plenty of room for my 70-pound and 100-pound dogs to ride in back.

"Bottom line, I've never had a car I've been this excited about for this duration. And I feel like I was a little smarter than some, because I took the leap when it was still questionable."

Vangerov adds, "I'm likely to keep this car and hand it down to a family member or drive it into the ground. If Toyota comes out with a plug-in hybrid in 2010, the cost would have to be comparable to what I paid and offer a significant incentive to get me to give up a car that already meets my needs."

There's nothing wrong with buying a car based strictly on your needs. You can feel excitement and emotional engagement with the Prius every night when you pull into your garage with the trip computer showing 45 mpg. If Prius sales totals are any indication, this is enough for literally hundreds of thousands of people.

But we're all about wants. We like a car that gives you excitement and enjoyment when you leave the garage in the morning, not just when you return at night. And for us, that wouldn't be a 2009 Toyota Prius.

The manufacturer provided Edmunds this vehicle for the purposes of evaluation.