Over the Thanksgiving holiday the team over at GreenCarReports.com were lent a Toytoa Prius Plug-in Prototype to test. The plug-in Prius is one of those cars Toyota enthusiasts have been waiting for and speculating for quiet some time—some even call it a super Prius. Now that our sister site has spent four days behind the wheel, we have to ask the logical question: Will the plugin Prius compete directly with the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid or perhaps even the all-electric Nissan LEAF?

We don’t want to steal our sister sites thunder, especially since it sounds like they had some good fun during their Drive Report. However, it is safe to say that the Prius plug-in hybrid prototype doesn’t have the “wow” factor in the fuel efficiency category that the 2011 Chevrolet Volt has (even if the figure are confusing to calculate). Since it is a prototype, it is hard to get actual numbers for how far you can drive on only electric power, but over 777 miles of logged driving John Voelcker noted that the Prius plug-in prototype only used complete EV power for 8% of the time. Basically, that means the vehicle acted as a basic Prius hybrid for the other 92% of the time. The averaged mpg clocked in at 53.9 miles over the entire test, which seems to point to a not so significant gain over the 2010 Prius combined 50 mpg.

Sounds kind of interesting doesn’t it? Be sure to check out all of the details in GreenCarReports.com’s Drive Report. The thing we will say is that the Prius plug-in isn’t in the same arena as the Volt, but the pricing is supposed to be so close to the regular Prius hybrid that people will have to think twice before passing up the plug-in version.

 

[Source: GreenCarReports.com]