The Prius Plug-in’s lithium-ion battery is smaller than the nickel-metal hydride one used in the standard Prius, but it can produce more power. As the “plug-in” name suggests, it can be easily and quickly recharged by being connected to an ordinary power supply at home or at work, or at a roadside charging point. A full recharge takes only about an hour and a half and we are researching how we can make it even easier with wireless charging technology, so you don’t even have to use connector cables.

Most typical commuting journeys can be covered using the car’s electric power alone. For example, someone with a 10km journey to and from work that includes highway driving would still be able to complete the entire trip using only electric power, recharging their car’s battery each evening ready for the next day’s commute. On longer trips, the electric motor and hybrid gasoline engine work together in the same smooth and efficient way as in our other full hybrid vehicles. As a result, the Prius Plug-in has extremely low CO2 emissions of just 49g/km.

Prius Plug-in Hybrid was the world’s first mass-market plug-in hybrid.

In the future we expect this technology to be featured in an increasing number of cars, as the recharging infrastructure develops and different car makers work to meet increasingly stringent national and international emissions regulations.

We believe plug-in hybrid is a natural evolution of our hybrid technology and an important means to help further reduce emissions in the future.

We wanted to be sure our plug-in hybrid technology could deliver the kind of easy, efficient performance we required, so our development programme included a three-year pilot study in the French city of Strasbourg. Seventy cars were used by different project partners, each fitted with data-logging equipment so we could analyse the kind of journeys drivers made, how far they travelled and how often and where they recharged the battery.

The information we gathered after four million kilometres of driving helped us fine-tune the Prius Plug-in to make it as efficient and effective as possible, including adjusting its electric-powered range to be sure it could cover the great majority of typical urban journeys.

The findings below show performance in comparison to an equivalent gasoline-powered car, unless otherwise stated.