The Toyota Prius is losing the hybrid war it started
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Drive Cast.
I'm not Kyle Tronka.
I'm Joel Federer, director of content and product at The Drive.
And The Drive Cast is our weekly podcast,
giving you an inside behind-the-scenes look
at the biggest stories, controversies, and people
shaping the automotive industry.
Today, senior editor Adam Ismail and I
are talking about the Toyota Prius, of all things.
I know, doesn't sound exciting, but this hybrid started
arguably a revolution.
This hybrid started arguably a revolution, a segment,
and really a moment in time.
From the red carpet and celebrities
to pinching pennies at the pump, the Prius
has served a role in the automotive ecosystem.
That's right, Joel.
And the Prius is arguably an icon in many ways,
for many reasons for various people.
It's hard to believe, but the nameplate is almost 30 years
old, and yet we're only on the fifth generation.
And time's flying because that only came out in 2022.
Truth, and I was at the debut in LA, and now I feel old.
And while it's been nearly 30 years,
the Prius we know today, and even yesterday,
isn't how it started.
What was originally a quirky, ugly economy car that
was efficient morphed over the years
into a cultural icon.
It was the second generation Prius that really
is the car everyone associates with the fuel-efficient car
many grew up with and around.
Celebrities suddenly drove these things.
They were on TV shows and movies.
And while not quite quirky, they
didn't look like everything else.
Honestly, the second generation Prius
was a breakout hit in ways Toyota probably
didn't even see coming.
But things change, and so did the Prius.
The third gen started trying to be stylish,
but the moment somehow passed as time moved on.
Midway through the third generation's lifecycle,
you also got the Tesla Model S, and suddenly there
was a hot new number on the market
that redefined what efficiency was.
But not everyone was ready to drop $60,000 or $100,000
on a car like that.
You could buy multiple members of the family
a Prius for that kind of money.
To stand out, the fourth gen Prius
got a little weird again with its design mojo,
especially in plug-in form.
And that one was called the Prime Model, of course.
But the fifth gen, the car we have today,
is a radical departure with a truly cool-looking design.
And I personally think it's one of the best-looking cars
on the road.
And that's also where we are now, the fifth generation.
But things aren't going terribly well as of late.
What was once a cultural sensation and icon
is now experiencing plummeting sales
as we enter the second quarter of 2026.
Last week, Adam reported a story that really took off
and after noticing those plummeting sales,
he reached out to Toyota and said,
what's up, what's going on here?
So today, it's about the Prius, how we got here,
what's going on, and why they're not selling.
By the way, if you like what we're doing here,
do us a favor with a five-star review
on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
It really does help get the drive cast
in front of more people.
Let's go.
Okay, so Adam, real talk.
Have you ever driven a Prius?
Which generations?
And have you spent a lot of time in these things?
I have a really bad answer
because I have never driven a single Prius before.
I've been in more of them as Ubers
than I can count probably.
So I've definitely spent time in Prii.
I think Toyota answered that question.
Prii is the plural.
That was a whole thing.
That was a whole thing.
It was a big, those big PR thing they did for a while.
But yeah, so I don't really have any
behind the wheel experience with the Prius.
I'm sorry to say.
Well, so are there a lot of Prius, Prii,
wherever, where you grew up?
Do they have stigma, where you live?
There was a really stigma that I do remember
seeing a lot of them, though, with that second gen
in the mid-2000s.
That car was everywhere.
Everywhere.
I remember when I started this in the auto industry,
the second gen was on sale still.
And I remember my first trip to LA,
you would think that was the number one selling car
in the world.
I mean, you remember there were waiting lists.
Toyota could not fill orders quickly enough.
And then finally, actually in the early 2010s,
it seemed like they were really able
to start cranking them out
and actually getting them to people as quickly as possible.
But yeah, sometimes I'll go back and watch
just old episodes of Top Gear just for the nostalgia hit.
And so many new segments on that show
started with them interviewing Cameron Diaz
or whoever, some sort of a celebrity.
And the first question they ask is,
do you own the Prius?
Like it was really in that moment at the time.
Okay, so let's get into it.
Today's topic's all about Prius, right?
And so last week, you had a story
because we had numbers that were released.
So we got quarterly numbers
and just general sales numbers for the month.
And that also gave us our first hint
for many automakers how sales are trending in 2026 versus 2025.
And so you wrote a story because you noted
that Prius sales were kind of tanking.
And that was interesting.
Walk us through that real quick.
Yeah, so through the first three months of 2026,
Toyota recorded 9,737 units of the Prius sold,
which was down 41 and a half percent
from the same period last year
where they had sold 16,653 through March again.
So that's a pretty stark sort of cliff.
And it really just started us asking questions
about what's going on, what is the sort of,
you can never really sort of pin it
to like taste changes or things like that that quickly.
But is it a function of the economy and tariffs
and the geopolitical stuff that's going on?
Is it the function of like Toyota supplier issues
because they've had some of those over in Japan recently?
And yeah, so we reached out and we asked them.
Yeah, what did they tell us?
So the official response from Toyota was that,
and I'll just quote them here,
we saw demand shift toward Camry
largely because of its strong fuel economy.
Fortunately, Camry and Prius share some components
which gave us the flexibility
to scale back Prius production
and increase Camry production.
We're always working to match production
as closely as possible to what customers want.
And in this case, we were able to adjust quickly.
Okay, hold up, backup.
There is so much in that three sentence response
that I wanna start poking at
and get your take and some answers on
because to be clear for everyone at home listening to this,
I was at the New York Auditor's show last week
doing a bunch of interviews and doing other things
while Adam was triaging this.
And so seeing this response and hearing you say this
as someone who went to the launch of the current Camry,
I've driven all these Priuses,
first off, they don't share that many components.
In fact, they're not even built in the same country.
Yeah, and that's the thing.
So you get a response like this
and all the maker responses
are usually going to be something
to the extent of we're adjusting
based on what the market wants.
Everyone's always adjusting
based on what the market wants, right?
That's just what you do as a business.
But this invited even more questions
because as you said, they don't really share components.
I mean, there might be some like basic stuff,
maybe some like tech or trim maybe related stuff.
I don't know, but as far as their internal combustion
engines are concerned, they're not the same.
They're both four cylinders, of course,
but the Camry's is 2.5 liters.
The Prius that is sold in this country,
only Prius we get is two liters.
Maybe there's some commonality
with the electric motors or the batteries,
stuff like that, who knows.
But it's not like they were making
the ES versus the Camry, right?
It's a completely different car.
And so that did strike me as obvious as well.
Well, so that's the first half of that.
That definitely strikes me as like, okay,
how many components these cars really sharing?
Because it's not the gas engine, right?
And I'm pretty sure the barrier packs themselves
are not the exact same barrier pack.
And if I'm wrong, someone's going to totally light me
up in the comments.
And that's fine.
But then you get to the second half of this.
This whole we match production closely
and scale flexibility.
So a lot of automakers, for consumers that don't know,
a lot of cars are built on the same lines, right?
So automakers have lines that can sell
and build multiple cars down the line.
Kia, Hyundai, a lot of automakers
are building different cars on the same line.
That is not the case with this situation.
The Prius and the Camry are not built in the same country.
Forget the same line.
So maybe they're scaling up Camry production
and they're scaling back Prius production?
Sure.
But there is no correlation of like,
well, you're scaling Prius production back
so you can make more Camrys.
That's not how that works.
Yeah.
They don't rule out the same factory.
They're not taking parts that would go into Camry
in that factory and putting them in the Prius or vice versa.
The Camry that you can go to your Toyota dealer
and buy here in the US, they're all made in Kentucky.
Whereas every Prius for the entire world
is made out of the Tsutsumi plant in Japan.
So that then naturally leads you to say,
okay, well, there's a lot of stuff going on
with terrorists right now.
Probably behooves Toyota the focus more on the cars,
the models that they produce here in the US
that they're going to sell in the US
versus something like the Prius that they have to import.
So what you're saying is maybe the margins
are a little better on the Camry these days, huh?
I would think and then it's funny too
because if you go into how much these cars cost,
because now this leads us naturally into a discussion
of like your consumer, you walk into a Toyota dealership,
you're faced with these two cars,
how are you comparing them?
What's the value proposition for each of them?
The Prius starts it and this includes delivery 29745.
The Camry starts at 3495.
So that's not even a thousand dollar difference.
And if you are an American consumer
and you see these two cars,
every Camry now is a hybrid by the way too,
that's very important.
But you look at the prices between the two of them,
you look at the size that you get with the Camry
because the Prius is still a small car.
It's always been a small car.
The new one, I think like you look at it
in a silhouette proportionally,
like it seems like it's even smaller in the previous gen.
They do compare pretty favorably to each other.
But I mean, for an American buyer,
they're gonna go with the Camry.
The Prius gets around 56 MPGs,
you know, not the plug-in hybrid, the regular one.
Camry gets like 52, like 50, 51, 52.
You do the math, you know?
I think it's pretty obvious
which direction people are gonna go in.
So if you walk in and you're like,
huh, I can get a lot bigger car with more leg room
all around and more hip room and more head room
and more all these things and more cargo room.
And I'm gonna lose maybe four, five,
six MPG in the process,
but I'm still getting like almost 50 MPG.
And I'm gonna pay the same amount of money.
Exactly.
And losing five MPG when you're around 50
is not the same as losing five MPG
when you're maybe getting 25, right?
It's you're willing to take that hit.
Right.
So I do think that there is a level here.
Now the Camry is all hybrid all the time
that when you're asking the same amount of money
for a larger car that gets ostensibly
within spinning range of the same fuel economy,
which also we're now at 50 MPG.
What's the difference between 50 and 56?
You know, now if the Prius breaks 60,
there's some marketing campaign.
So talk to me a little about Camry sales.
Like where does that leave Camry sales right now?
Yeah, so that's the air question is,
okay, how well is the Camry doing?
And the Camry is doing better since the start
of this year, January through March.
So same timeframe that we were talking about the Prius.
Toyota sold 78,255 of them in the US.
And over that same time span the year earlier,
it was 70,308.
Slight increase.
Honestly, you look around and there's a lot of things
that you know, there's a lot of people
always talking about the death of the sedan,
especially in the US, right?
But sedans can be still healthy.
I was pretty floored.
I was surprised at the end of the year
when Kia reported their numbers.
K4 is their second best selling car
and it was like 140,000 on the year
and it was only like 20,000 behind the sportage.
If you know what you're doing and you price it right,
you can still sell a sedan.
And the Camry, you know, even if you go back
like 20 years to its height in, you know,
probably the early 2000s when Toyota was shifting
like well over 400, you know,
almost touching like half a million of them in the US alone.
I mean, last year Toyota sold 316,185.
That's not bad.
Anyone would take that, right?
That's meaningful number.
There's a lot of cars.
So the Camry's healthy.
And I think, you know,
something that we haven't even touched on.
So Camry is full out of hybrid now,
which definitely plays a role
in where we're just being distanced from the price.
I'll also note that, you know,
if you're rounding numbers,
Camry's up, let's call it, 8,000 units, right?
And if you look at the numbers for the Prius deficit,
you're at, you know, eight-ish, nine-ish, 1,000 units.
So one could argue that you're swapping cars, right?
And arguably the Camry, you know,
it's cost $1,000 more-ish and the reality is
they probably have a higher margin on that
because of the fact they don't have tariffs right now.
But there's other factors too we gotta look at, right?
So back when the Prius came out, it was their hybrid.
That's what they had, right?
Camry is all hybrid all the time now.
Yes, but now you can get a Corolla hybrid.
You can get a Corolla Cross hybrids.
Now you can get one that sits a little higher
and it's like more of a crossover, right?
At one point, we had the Venza come back
only as a hybrid, but that's gone.
But now we have the RAV4 and the RAV4,
they sell a lot of hybrids.
There are a lot of hybrids in their lineup now.
It's kind of where I'm going with this.
And so the Prius was, you want to say fuel,
you want to make a statement kind of thing, right?
This is before electric cars for that second gen.
You drove a Prius, like it stood for something.
Now, so many cars on the road,
from so many automakers,
from Kia and Hyundai to Ford and GM,
you can get hybrids in a lot of vehicles, right?
And I think that is also a factor here.
Yeah, looking back, I mean, we do have to acknowledge
that the Prius, it was a household name.
It was really big at the moment in time,
but it was really because of what it stood for
and the technology that it introduced
more than ultimately approved the model,
the name, the brand itself.
It became like a byword for fuel economy
as we were talking about the star of the show, right?
The byword for efficiency and efficient transportation.
And Toyota is like the,
obviously like at the forefront
of electrifying their whole lineup.
I mean, I think more,
probably more than any other manufacturer's lineup.
Like there are so many different hybrids out there
that Toyota the sells that touch each of their body styles.
Whether you're talking about small cars like this,
like the Prius, the Dan's like the Camry,
going all the way up into like the I-Force Max
and stuff like that for the trucks.
I mean, they're hybridizing everything, right?
So it's almost, you could say like the Prius did its job.
It introduced the technology, got people familiar with it,
got people to associate hybrids with fuel economy
and saving money and all that stuff.
And now it's almost like,
I would hate to lose the Prius
because it just feels like
you just never think of a world where Toyota
doesn't make a Prius anymore, right?
But it does kind of almost get like,
deserve like the honorable discharge at this moment.
Like if Toyota was to decide
that they would stop making Priuses, I'd get it.
Like it worked, you know, the experiment worked.
That is actually like crazy to think about.
Toyota not making a Prius.
It's funny cause Tesla just stopped making
the Tesla Model S and Model Y or Model X.
I'm sorry, the Model S and Model X.
What terrible names.
But the S came along and like stole
a lot of the Prius' thunder back in 2012-ish, right?
Like all of a sudden these celebrities are getting into EV
because this is the redefining of what efficiency is.
It's the redefining of this car stands the forefront.
Cause that really was part of it
to your point earlier of it was a tech tour to force.
Like we had this electric battery in there
and we have an electric motor in there
and they're all working together in unison,
some magic to make it move and it's sipping fuel.
So, you know, I think that there is a question of like,
does the Prius matter anymore?
Is this moment in time over?
I also would argue or talk a little about the fact
that the design of the current car,
it's one for the fences.
I remember the debut and I was there
and I looked at the thing and I'm like,
whoa, this thing looks cool.
No one ever said that about Prius before, right?
No, God, no.
Drew Collins, if I remember correctly at the drive,
he had a yellow one.
And I think like people on the road were like thumbs-uping
and yeah, it looks like a little like in yellow.
You see that car from the side?
It gives me like Gallardo vibes.
I'm like, yeah, obviously nobody is going to mistake
those two cars for each other,
but like it looks like a baby super car,
like a cute, cute, defied sort of the super car
that obviously isn't going anywhere fast,
but like the rake on that windshield is crazy.
And we were saying before, like the Prius today,
it's of a similar size to the previous gen,
but they did actually kind of cut like an inch
to an inch and a half out of the height of the vehicle.
And I think that's also something to talk about
because somebody reached out to us, a Prius owner,
and said, I went to a Toyota dealership,
sat on one of these, I think the car looks cool,
I don't fit in it.
And that guy was, I don't remember if he said
how tall he was, but he was like, if you're 5'10",
I'm 5'10", it's like you might have a hard time.
So yeah, for the design and everything that car does well
from an aesthetic standpoint, you do still pay a price.
I mean, I am 5'10", and I have driven the current Prius.
And if you don't get in and watch your head,
you'll hit it.
Yeah.
I'm not that tall.
I mean, 5'10", gotta be average.
Yeah, we're not tall.
No, I'm not tall, I'm not short, they're not tall.
And so that front A-pillar definitely compromises things.
I've sat behind, like I had the front seat adjusted
for myself and then I got in the back and like, I fit,
but there's not a ton of leg room.
It's not a large car.
The way it does drive is pretty quick for what it is today.
The electric motor definitely powers, it's a momentum car.
And I kind of liked that there was hard buttons
and toggles for everything, incredible fuel economy,
like just truly incredible fuel economy.
And every feature I really wanted,
the one I drove, it had,
he has steering wheel and apple, car plate,
all these things, but it's loud inside.
And you don't get that in the Camry.
And it's because the Camry is a little more substantial car,
right?
It almost feels like we're lacking some sound deadening
almost in the Prius at the moment.
And it can get expensive, by the way.
I should also mention that,
like you can get a $50,000 Prius.
Yeah, that's the thing is like you look at,
I know they're not doing the Camry TRD anymore,
but like you look at how expensive the Camry could get
and what those look like.
And it's like, okay, I could see somebody being like,
that's a sharp sedan, especially with the new generation.
I don't think it's an amazing looking car,
but it's not a bad looking car.
Whereas like the Prius,
I don't know if I've ever looked at Prius
and been like that looks-
I lied, I lied.
You can get it to about 40 grand.
I was off, I don't want someone calling me.
I think the $50,000 must have been the plug-in hybrid.
I'm sorry.
The plug-in hybrid's more expensive.
But even then the point remains,
I mean, you spend like that much
on even the plug-in hybrid,
it doesn't look like a car that would cost that much.
We've all experienced all the mode of market
in the last five, six years.
People are used to paying a lot of money for cars now,
but the Prius doesn't really sort of lend itself well
to those like higher trim levels, I would say.
Yeah, no.
So I mean, loaded up Prius Prime, you're at about 45-ish,
which I mean, look, 45, now you're getting,
I mean, that's the other problem, right?
One of the value propositions we were talking earlier,
right?
You could buy a Prius for $20,000,
you could buy a Model S for $60,000 to $100,000.
Now, it's like for $45,000, $50,000,
you can get a new EV, forget a used EV.
Used EV, you can pick up an Ioniq 5, Ioniq 6, $20,000,
$25,000, you can pick up a Lucid Air for $35,000.
So I mean, we live in this time where I could pick up
a Lucid Air for the price of a new Prius.
You're talking used, but yeah, that makes sense.
And you have to think like all the people
that 20 years ago might have bought a Prius
because it stood for those things,
they're buying EVs now.
Yes, they should.
Correct.
You're gonna buy an Ioniq 5 or whatever.
Because if you were buying it to make a statement,
that statement is an EV.
And then you're going down the hole,
am I gonna buy a Tesla and I'm associating
with Elon Musk and everything's gone there,
which is a whole thing.
Or buying the Hyundai's, the Kia's,
these are great EVs, they're great cars.
And you can buy a lot of car for not a lot of money
when you're buying on the used market now.
So I do think that we're in a different moment in time.
I'm not sure they're gonna kill it yet.
I think it is a tech innovator for them.
To be clear, I don't think they're gonna kill the Prius.
I do think it's quite possible
that the Prius does not continue to be sold in the US.
And that's based on nothing Toyota said,
that's just my gut, my hunch feeling.
But I wouldn't be surprised
if the car gets discontinued here.
It's still like they make in Japan,
it's a big part of Toyota's identity.
And I feel like they'll keep that around.
I'm sure they move them in Japan and around the world.
But in a market like America
where size is important, things like that,
we're maybe starting to move to a place
where it doesn't make as much sense here anymore.
Now that being said,
we're all talking about this during what tariffs are now.
And all that business going on,
who knows what the next couple of years
are going to bring maybe continuation of this sort of stuff
or maybe something completely different.
We don't know.
But if things continue as the way they are,
which is really the only way
that you can talk about the future,
then yeah, I wouldn't be surprised
if the Prius didn't last much longer here.
Yeah, I mean, and I can play both sides there, right?
So, Q1 of 2026, they sold 2046 GRE6s.
Totally even car to be clear,
but I'm trying to paint a picture here.
It's a sports car, low volume car,
but they're not killing that car right now, right?
And so they sold 2000 of these things.
And at the same time, at the other end of the spectrum,
you can pick up a brand new hybrid LE,
so like a base version Corolla hybrid for like 25 grand.
And it gets 46 miles per gallon highway rating of 53 city.
So we're in Prius territory.
Totally different car.
Does not have the Prius styling, does not look cool.
Let's be clear, this thing doesn't look cool.
But it's a little practical, right?
You and I are not going to hit our head on the A-pillar
getting into that Corolla.
I think that the Prius looks cooler.
I'd probably rather be in the Prius
just because it looks cooler.
I think the Prius looks awesome.
I really wanna like spend some time with the Prius.
Even if it's, you know, it's not,
at this point as we're talking about,
it's not a new car, right?
It's not like a brand new thing.
It's, it just is what it is.
But I am a sucker for,
I think that car design peaked in the 90s
when everything looks like a, you know, a bubble.
I'm that guy.
I'm the jelly bean guy, okay?
Like point all of your complaints
about jelly bean EVs or whatever it be
because I like the way, not every EV,
but I like that general aesthetic, right?
So the Prius wins with me.
I think the Pri, I think this gen Prius looks fantastic.
And just to throw it out there,
Toyota did feel the Prius race car in Japan
and super GT, not this generation,
the previous generation, the GT 300 car,
take, go Google image search that car.
That car looks fantastic.
That, that shows you like they could do a GR Prius
and it would be pretty friggin' awesome.
You know, that could be interesting.
Like a GR Prius, like a GR Badged Prius.
And, you know, Octio is like real big.
I'm GRing all the things.
And so that could be, that could be interesting.
Like maybe we need a TRD, TRD, GR,
Gazoo Racing, a Prius.
That would light up sales, I'm sure.
It's never happening in a million years,
but I'd love to see it.
So closing thoughts, do you, your prediction?
You would think that they would maybe kill the Prius
in the US, but keep it in other markets.
Is that what I'm hearing?
Yeah, I think if things continue as they are
in terms of the legislation, everything in this country,
then yeah, I could see the Prius go in the way
in the US in five years.
But I think it matters so much to Toyota as a brand,
like as a thing to be proud of,
that they'll keep it elsewhere.
I don't know.
I really don't know that they,
I think that they would keep it around globally
or kill it globally.
And the only reason I say that is because
it's a statement.
It is a statement and they have a lot of pride in this.
And I think that it's a historical name plate
at this point, given even though it's less than 30 years,
we're almost at the 30 year mark,
30 years is not a long time for a historical name plate.
It's, I mean, the car, if it died tomorrow,
it'll still be part of history, right?
Like it is a moment in history that car made history.
I don't know.
I'm not sure if I see it dying or not here.
I think that either it all lives or all dies,
but you're not wrong about the sales.
And sales continue to dwindle.
Yeah, and I would love to be wrong about this.
Like I love small cars.
I do not want the Prius to go away, right?
But yeah, we're gonna see the next couple of years
are going to be telling on so many fronts,
but on this one particularly as we're talking about today,
it's gonna, we're gonna learn a lot, I think.
Well, and for reference, you know,
if we look back at history, right?
So the first one was 97, the second one came in 2003.
So that's six years.
The third one came in six years later.
And then the fourth one came in six years later.
And then the fifth one came in seven years later.
So we're currently four years into this.
So somewhere between two to four years
is where we kind of should be at for a next-gen Prius
you would think based on timelines.
Three years, two and a half years
will be in a new political timeline here
and around other places as well.
Also, suddenly we have like a short room full of EVs
at Toyota.
So who could have predicted that in 2026?
And that's the other thing.
I mean, especially like you look at
when they introduced the BZ4X
and I never drove that car, the launch one.
But everyone I talked to, at least journalistic side
was like, this is not it.
And they have come such a far way
and knows what like three, three years,
four years since that car hit the market.
And I drove the new BZ and the CHR
and the BZ Woodland two months ago.
Those are great cars.
They're not perfect, but they are good enough for sure.
So that's also part of the conversation.
I agreed when the first BZ came out,
it felt like you didn't care.
Did you try?
Did you read the memo?
And I haven't driven the new Toyota version,
but I drove the Subaru Sotera version,
which is just a reskin and some software.
And it was a good car.
Like I could imagine this would be like
a fine daily driver car.
Yeah, absolutely.
TBD in the future of the Prius,
but sales not so hot.
So, you know, if you like these things,
maybe buy one instead of a Corolla.
I don't know.
That's it for this week's episode of The Drive Cast.
Thanks to Toyota for answering our questions,
to Adam for his time and insights.
Thanks to our editor, Tyler Mark.
And thank you for listening.
We'll be back next Wednesday.
Be sure to check out TheDrive.com
for our full coverage and a whole lot more.
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About this episode
Toyota’s Prius, the hybrid icon that kicked off a fuel-sipping revolution, is now seeing steep declines in 2026 sales. The Drivecast traces how the nameplate evolved from the quirky second-gen breakout to the Tesla-era wake-up call, then into today’s stylish fifth-gen—while demand shifts toward the Camry and a broader Toyota hybrid lineup. The hosts dig into Toyota’s explanation (production scaling and “demand shift”), pricing/value comparisons, and why the Prius’ once-clear mission is less unique now. They debate whether the Prius survives in the US or fades to other markets.
Original notes
The Toyota Prius is an icon, a statement, and possibly a moment in time as the nameplate approaches its 30th anniversary. Sales of what was once a cultural icon are spiraling. The Prius arguably hasn't been the "it car" that it was once upon a time with EVs taking the mantle for an eco-friendly statement, countless hybrid entries now flooding the market in every conceivable shape and size, and time itself marching on. Even Toyota's own showroom is filled with hybrids.
The latest Prius is a winner in terms of eye-catching design, but its a loser in terms of sales. It's not a new issue, but it's a continuing one with the numbers becoming grimmer as the months and years go by. The Prius has had a rough decade. It's likely not one single issue at hand, but multiple factors all colliding at once.
Senior Editor Adam Ismail and Director of Content and Product Joel Feder dive into what Toyota said in terms of Prius sales plunging, take a look at all the outside factors, and discuss whether the outlook is dire for the Prius or if the icon will live on.
Stories mentioned in today's episode:
Prius Sales Are Tanking So Far in 2026. We Asked Toyota Why
2026 Toyota Prius Nightshade Review: The Practical Car Goes Peacocking
I Drove a Yellow Toyota Prius and My Whole Town Fell in Love
00:00 Intro
04:38 Prius sales are tanking
09:30 The Prius vs the Camry
11:53 Sedan sales can still be healthy
13:11 Various factors affecting Prius sales
14:04 The Prius was a household name
16:22 Does the Prius matter anymore?
23:33 Do we need a sporty Prius?
24:14 Will Toyota kill the Prius in the U.S.? Will the nameplate live on?
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