This past weekend, one of my good friends had a visitor from IUP.  She drove here to hangout for the weekend, and she came up in her Prius.  Now, I have a completely rational dislike of the Prius.  

 

An hour later I get a phone call from my friend.  The Prius wouldn’t start, and they wanted to see if I could fix it.  I got it running, after a much larger headache than it should’ve caused.  The battery had died and needed to be jumped.  An easy task.  

 

Here is the problem though.  

 

In the name of “efficiency”, the main battery is in the trunk, under the main trunk manifold.  The reason why is so they can use less material in the engine bay to make it smaller.  But in a Prius, when the battery dies the electric locks and trunk release seize up.  Which meant I had to crawl in through the window and rip apart the manifold from the inside to find the manual latch, twice.  

 

Eventually, I got the battery running again, but ran into another problem.  

 

You see the transmission in a Prius is also mainly computer based.  After it is jumped, it has to be on a level surface to shift out of park into neutral, reverse, or drive.  Which meant I had to hop into the fuse box and disconnect the fuse connecting the transmission to the wheels to push it out and get it running again.  Worst of all, I had to throw away my pride and swallow my dignity when my friend asked me to drive them to where they were going in fear that they wouldn’t know what to do if the car broke down again.  

 

So with God as my witness, I had to drive a Prius.  

Another incredibly stupid feature of the Prius is that the engine cuts out at a stop or when going out at low speeds to save on gas.  But when the battery is dying and cannot be recharged, that is not ideal at all.  To get the battery to charge, I had to drive in a spirited manner to keep the engine engaged, but in a Prius that just meant I drove the speed limit.  I had my foot to the floor the entire time and the car would take longer than Congress to decide if it wanted to get moving.  

 

And that is where I think the problem therein lies.  

 

The Prius is the antithesis of an enthusiasts car.  It is built entirely for people who do not care at all for the act of driving, and see a car as nothing more than a tool.  It is built for the sake of efficiency at the expense of everything else.  The interior is cheap and dated, the ride is pretty horrible, the handling is god awful, and it looks like a half circle for no other reason than to look “economical”.  

 

I have nothing against hybrids, I have something against the Prius.  Auto Manufacturers around the world have proven that Hybrids don’t have to be dreary and miserable and make you look like you have a haircut that says “Can I speak to the manager?”.  

 

The Holy Trinity of Hypercars right now is the Porsche 918, the Ferrari LaFerrari, and the McLaren P1.  All three are cars with near 1000hp, cost over $1 million, and are hybrids.  They use electric motors with more horsepower than most traditional low powered gasoline engines.  On the “cheaper” end of the spectrum you have the BMW i8 and the new Acura NSX.  Even cheaper is the Honda CR-Z, the Lexus GS Hybrid, the Porsche Panamera Hybrid, etc.  All of these performance oriented hybrids do something the Prius doesn’t.  

They run both motors in tandem.  

 

The Prius runs one or the other to use the engine as little as possible.  

 

The Honda CRZ in my mind, is a far better vehicle than the Prius, and it is is just as economical and envirofriendly.  The CRZ is also far cheaper than the Prius, coming in at about $5k cheaper on the lowest trim, and about $10k cheaper at the highest trim.  The CRZ puts out equal power as the Prius, but because it runs both the electric motor in tandem with the gasoline engine, it performs on par with most low end sports cars.  And it doesn’t look like a deformed grapefruit.  

Hybrids are the future, and that is a future I am okay with.  Electric motors can deliver instant torque, which makes accelerating improve extremely.  To repent from my sins of driving a Prius, I am now legally bound to increase the vehicular hooliganry I partake in, so I signed up for a track day after finals week.