my son learned to drive in a Prius. He called it the most hateful car he'd ever driven and refuses to get in one now.
Even a learner driver could feel how appalling the driving experience was.
Numb steering, numb brakes, zero acceleration, terrible stopping, skinny tires.
I always remember the Top Gear episode where they drove a Prius and a BMW 3 series around the track.
All the BMW had to do was keep up - and the BMW had better mpg at the end.
All that to say that driving a Prius to get 50mpg is terrible experience, while driving a Model 3 to 249 allows you to enjoy it.
Context - My Model 3 has averaged 252wh/mile over 57k mile of driving, lots of spirited driving and commutes etc etc.
Um. Not arguing too hard. But, since I first started driving cars around in the 1970's,
all of those cars were econoboxes. '71 VW Beetle, Datsun B210, Dodge Colt, Honda Accord (back when they were tinier than a current Civic), Honda Civic station wagon, a 2002 Civic (bigger than the Accord!), and, finally, the Prius.
The Prius had more get-up and go than any of those previous cars, got better gas mileage, and couldn't be made to skid without heroic efforts in the presence of snow and ice. Including on iced-up interstates in Connecticut with other cars spinning out all over.
Better riding and handling than any of the previous cars, with the possible exception of the 2002 Civic on the handling part. (Back seat of the Prius was better than either of the Civics.)
Getting up to 45 mpg on local and highway wasn't
that hard; in fact, the displays on a Prius make it a kind of game that's easy to win. What was kind of crazed was discovering that it kept its 50 mpg rating on a North-to-South run one summer on the Blue Ridge Parkway, and we're not talking about taking it easy on the uphills, either. Downhills on mountains get to be kind of fun, and one discovers that there's a Reason that the Prius has a "B" (for engine braking) on the shift knob.
A sporty car, the Prius ain't. And anybody who attempts to drive one like it is discovers pretty quickly that (a) the gas mileage suffers when one tries and (b) this car is never going to win anything at Monaco. But Baha-modified VW's notwithstanding, all of the econoboxes (except maybe the Colt) supported 4-wheel drifts in the snow and ice. The Prius kind of
doesn't support 4-wheel drifts, mainly because its anti-skid is so blame aggressive (has to do with regen braking only on the front wheels, I think) that the best one can do is, kind of, slide at a 20% angle to the direction of travel by cranking the steering wheel over and gassing it. That's the Gen III Prius; the Gen IV
looks sportier, but probably isn't. In any case, there's, what, 170 HP between the gas and electric motors in the thing, so, for an econobox, there's really no problem merging onto interstates.
Naturally, Top Gear wants, well, Top-Gear kinds of cars. I'd love to hear their opinions about SMART cars; they're probably unprintable. BMW are sporty driving machines; Priuses definitely aren't in that class.
What
is amazing is that, what with all that electrical motor torque and goodness, how the most cost-effective, fuel-efficient, fast-accelerating vehicles on the road are Teslas. So, Tesla is attracting not just the econobox crowd who go beserk over that 135+ MPGe, the nuclear family types who like the storage volume, but also the roadies who can't wait to take their M3Ps up Pikes Peak in record time.
There's only one thing I don't like about the M3: Rear seat comfort is worse than the Prius. That's fixed in the Y, X, and S, but, still. For two people in the front, still pretty good, though.
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