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The 2023 Toyota Prius made quite the splash once the first reveal images hit our site. It’s a big departure from previous egg-shaped Toyota hybrids in the fact that it looks half-decent now. My esteemed colleague Peter Nelson drove it for us and wrote up a review, and now the configurator is live on the Toyota website. I going to build one of my own.
I’m not so sure that it’s beautiful or stunning, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction for a car with some, er, stigma. The reduced greenhouse, much lower profile, and overall decent work on proportions go a long way. But the character lines are still a little haphazard. Also, the car uses hashtags everywhere. Performance-wise, it stands to be a big improvement over the old car.
But the configurator actually has a fair amount of trim levels and options to choose from. Starting with the base LE all the way to the top-trim Limited, there’s $8,415 price gap with lots of twists and turns between the two. There are also some options that aren’t strictly necessary, so I found a happy middle ground in the mid-grade XLE with some options.
I, of course, chose the nicely balanced Reservoir Blue (that’s actually available on lots of Toyotas) with a black interior. There is a bright glossy red but four greyscale colors that won’t offend, if that’s your speed. There’s also a grey interior that looks cheaper and worse, in my opinion. Finally, I optioned the $735 12.3-inch Toyota Audio Multimedia screen because a nicer screen is always worth it, and did not click the boxes for the glass roof and virtual key packages. The total came out to $32,725, but the XLE doesn’t have heated seats at all, with no option for them. Only the Limited gets that luxury, which seems ridiculous to me.
I specced out a similar Limited to see how much more I’d have to pay just to those precious heated seats. My lightly specced Limited with optional heated rear seats cost $35,910. It’s within range, but you would have to save up a little longer to graduate. It’s worth the extra cash for the range of standard extras, but I think the sweet spot is the lightly optioned XLE.
What does your ideal Prius spec look like?
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