We don’t often test ‘used’ cars on DriveLife, but Toyota offered us one of their Signature Class cars for review, and we felt it was worthy of review.
Signature Class cars from Toyota have been around for quite a while; you might be surprised to learn that they first kicked off in New Zealand in 1997 – almost 30 years ago. To date, there has been more than 50,000 of these used cars sold here.
Our test car had done just over 6,000km in two years – pretty low mileage and way less than it would generally have if it was a New Zealand-new car. It would be hard to see what Toyota would have to do to ‘recondition’ this Prius, but it certainly felt like a new car. Other than a slight bit of kerb rash that was going to be repaired, I could not find a single mark on this car to indicate it was two years old.
In fact, checking out the link for other Signature Class Prius models, some at 2 or even 3 years old have less than a few hundred kilometres on the clock. One 2024 model had just 24km on the odometer.
I tested a fourth-generation Prius Prime PHEV way back in 2018 when Toyota New Zealand sold them new here. That car impressed me far more than I had expected, although being only a four-seater felt like it would restrict its use as an Uber. The model we are testing here is a 5-seater.
Signature Class Toyota Prius – Overview
Signature Class Prius are available in a 1.8-litre or 2.0-litre petrol-hybrid. They come in Z, G & U grades (subject to availability), and all plug-in hybrid models come with home charger as standard.
Electric vehicle (EV) charge driving range is suggested to be 87km with 19” alloys and 105km with 17” Alloys.
The drive battery has a capacity of 13.6kWh, while combined engine power output is 164kW and torque is 208Nm. The car drives the front wheels through a constantly variable transmission (CVT).
Automatic parking is an option, and the Prius includes Toyota’s full suite of “Safety Sense” features.
Prices for the year of our test car are all around the $52,000 mark.
What We Like and Dislike About The 2024 Toyota Prius Z
| What we like | What we don’t like |
| Excellent ride quality Like a new car Design Long list of features Hybrid system operation Potential fuel economy Physical AC controls Adaptive brake regen Performance overall | No rear wiper Rear headroom Visibility Audio performance Voice commands don’t work Small boot capacity |
For a full list of specs and options available for the 2023 Toyota Prius Z, head on over to Toyota New Zealand’s website.
You can see more details specifically on the Signature Class Prius on this link and a range of cars for sale on this link.
First Impressions Of The 2024 Toyota Prius Z
Many will remember the Priuses of old, that were downright unattractive. A great, early hybrid system – but not the best-looking of cars, if we’re being kind.
When the fourth generation came along in 2015, finally the Prius looked ok, if not quite on the stylish side. Come 2022, and the fifth generation of the Prius is now a bloody stylish car.
Our test car was finished in Pearl White, and front or rear, looked fabulous. It has strong hints of the Camry we reviewed just a few weeks ago – the family resemblance is evident.
And while it does not have ‘Build Your Dreams’ across the boot, the “Hybrid Reborn’ under the rear number plate felt a little cringy. Thankfully, it’s pretty hard to see.
What’s The Interior Like In The 2024 Toyota Prius Z?
With over 6,000km on the clock, I was surprised my senses were assaulted with that new car smell in our test car. A good start.
First impressions of the interior include the feeling that this is a new car. There is nothing inside the car to show that it was not new; I’m not sure if this is part of Toyota’s reconditioning program, or just a Prius that’s been well looked after with no scuffs, or visible wear of any sort.
Another impression is of the centre console – it’s very high. That, along with the dashboard and the low steering wheel – to allow for the heads-up dashboard – means you may feel a bit cocooned in the Prius’ cockpit.
Switchgear is pretty standard Toyota, and happily, that means normal, push-buttons for the air conditioning. That also includes actual buttons for controlling the three-stage heated and cooled seats. There’s no need to go into the infotainment system to adjust anything for the AC, and that’s excellent.
I did go to use the Prius’ voice commands to alter the temperature without having to push a button, but the system is still set for Japanese – so you’d need to speak Japanese to use voice commands. I was pretty surprised at this; I thought the actual maker of the car would be able to get that sorted, even as a used import. There’s also Japanese writing in some of the infotainment system, but those two things are the only places in the infotainment system where I saw leftover Japanese import items. The radio is already set for New Zealand bands.
There’s a reasonable amount of storage inside the Prius; a good-sized centre cubby that can easily take a full-size digital camera, and another flat area at the front of the centre console. There is a hidden compartment under that flat area, and it even has “hidden compartment” printed inside it. Not sure just how hidden this makes it, but another handy area for your stuff. The glovebox is reasonable in size, as are the door pockets.
In front of the cubby is a vertical Qi wireless phone charger, so no danger of your cellphone going flying out of this one. At the front of the centre console are two USB-C ports, and a 12-volt socket for your dashcam. There are another 2 USB-C ports inside the cubby.
While the interior is black, there is a white headliner and pillars, so this helps break it up some. Our test car also had two moonroofs, with manual blinds. The moonroofs are split front/rear and don’t open at all – but they do let a good amount of natural light into the cabin.
Rear-seat passengers have some good legroom, but with the sloping roof, headroom is a bit of an issue. The rear doors have electric buttons to open them from the outside, but they take only a few goes to get the hang of; it’s pressing a button instead of pulling a door handle, so nothing too tricky. One thing that is a little tricky, is exiting the rear seat; the seat is well forward of the rear wheel arch, so you sort of need to scoot back a little to get up and out the door.
Like the Prius PHEV I tested in 2018, the boot is pretty small, at 284 litres – this is actually smaller than the previous model (302 litres). The battery is under the boot, so this raises the level of the boot compared to a normal (non plug-in) Prius. There is a false floor, but this only gives you access to the 12-volt tyre pump – there’s no spare wheel on this car. There is an electric tailgate on this model of Prius.
What’s The 2024 Toyota Prius Z Like To Drive?
Straight off the bat, man, does this Prius ride well. It soaks up any irregularities in the road; it’s a real highlight of the car, with even my passengers commenting on it.
To counter that with something not so great – we had rain a lot of my time with the Prius, and it doesn’t have a rear window wiper. I wish this latest trend of no rear wiper would just go away, as it’s not as safe to not be able to see out the rear window when it’s wet. The rest of the car’s visibility is not that great, either. The C pillars are enormous (although there is blind-spot monitoring), and the A pillars are raked so sharply, they interfere with your view on the front-side of the car. The rear window is tiny too, adding to the poor visibility.
The interior mirror is similar to some Nissans, where you can flip the day/night lever and switch the digital mirror over to run from a camera on the back of the car. This gives the driver a full-width view, and it should work well. When it’s working in the Prius, it does work well, but the digital mirror in our test car only worked half the time.
Nighttime visibility is helped by the Prius’ headlights; they aren’t adaptive LED but they are self-levelling. The spread and depth of the beams is very good.
As always with a modern Toyota hybrid, the system is completely seamless and smooth. You just can’t tell when the car is switching between EV or engine mode, it just happens. Unless you have the energy flow graphic up on the dashboard, or listen carefully, there’s no way of knowing if you are running in EV mode, or hybrid mode.
Well, maybe in Wellington you can. With all our hills, the Prius’ motor can be somewhat noisy at times. Not enough to put it into our ‘What we don’t like’ list, but it can be a little intrusive on the worst of our hills. On the other hand, road and wind noise levels are very good. No doubt that helping this along is the double-glazing on the front windows. Tyre noise is higher than I expected, but in comparison to other cars on coarse chip seal, about the same.
Like other Priuses and some electric cars, the 5th gen model has a ‘B’ mode; when you pull the gear selector down to Drive, you can pull it again to B mode. This gives the car extra brake regeneration, to give you ‘free’ battery charge when going down hills, or even just slowing for stopped traffic. I spent most of my time in B mode. This generation of Prius also has an adaptive regen option in the infotainment menus, which means that the car will apply more or less brake regen, depending on the situation. For example, if you were approaching cars that were stopped, it would apply more and more regen as you get closer. If there’s nothing in front of you and you lift off the gas pedal, the car will coast more. It’s a brilliant system that’s appearing in more and more cars, and it’s excellent to see it in a ‘used’ Prius.
In saying that, at times on Wellington’s narrow streets, the adaptive regen function would start slowing the car, even though I was staying in my lane to pass parked cars. This happened relatively regularly, but I got used to it.
There is one caveat with the B mode on this Prius, and it applies to every Toyota I’ve been in with a B mode option; you can’t use adaptive cruise control when B mode is selected. You’ll get a warning on the dashboard, so you need to pull the gear lever down again to move back to Drive, and then adaptive cruise mode will work. I don’t understand why Toyota does this, or doesn’t just make it that if you are in B mode and engage adaptive cruise, it turns B mode off. I can see this confusing some drivers, as it is.
If you want to play around with some hybrid settings, there is a button that you can press to force the car to use EV mode, or hit it again and it will go to ‘Auto’ and the car will decide if EV mode or hybrid mode is best. Thankfully, the Prius Z remembers the button’s setting, as compared to previous models where you’d have to turn it on every time if you wanted to only drive in EV mode (until the battery ran out).
I mention this as I wanted to use as little fuel as possible in our week with the Prius, so having that setting on all the time was excellent. There is also an EV/HV Charge button, so if you live in a town that only allows zero-emission vehicles in certain areas, you can force the car’s petrol engine to start charging. To achieve the least possible amount of petrol engine use, I charged the car at home every night from a wall socket, and other places where I could and it was convenient.
You get to pick from 4 drive modes in your Prius; Eco, Normal, Sport, and Custom. They all work as expected, and as expected, I left the test car in Normal most of the time. In Normal mode, there’s plenty of performance for everyday driving, and in Sport mode, is pretty damn sprightly. In the wet, there’s some wheelspin on full-throttle acceleration, but it’s all controllable. The 100km/h sprint takes 6.7 seconds, a very reasonable number for this type of car. The CVT is what lets the car down a bit if you do want some acceleration; it’s a bit slurry, with plenty of CVT flaring evident. It’s not bad at all in everyday driving, where you’ll barely notice it’s a CVT.
The caveat on this is that if driving in EV-only mode, the performance is acceptable, but not outstanding – but it will keep up with traffic. If you want peppy performance, leave the car in EV/HV Auto and let it start the engine when you need more oomph.
The car comes with a home charger, but it’s not one of the ‘wall box’ items, it’s simply a charger for plugging into a standard power point. This meant 7 to 8 hours to charge the car from flat, but hey, it was overnight so who cares. Each day, the dash would show around 78-80km of range, which is excellent. Most New Zealanders drive just 27km a day, so this is a good number to have in your pocket. The Prius PHEV is charged via an old-school CHAdeMO port, so not the far more common Type 2 charging port.
Of course, you don’t have to plug the Prius Z in at all if you don’t want to – you can just get in and drive it, and if the drive battery goes flat, the petrol engine will start and charge it. The Prius is so efficient at this, it will turn the petrol engine off and on many times a minute, if it can use just a small amount of charge in the battery. While some owners might not care about plugging the Prius Z in and charging it, with Road User Charges (RUCs), why wouldn’t you? You’ve got to pay your RUCs anyway, so make the most of it.
To help you do this, you can set a charging schedule up in the car’s infotainment system, to use cheaper electricity hours (if you have them). While driving, at any time you can check out the energy flow on the infotainment screen. Sadly, just like the latest Camry, the energy flow meter looks terribly boring. It’s all chunky and Minecrafty, but not in a good way.
The car’s adaptive cruise control is excellent – very smooth, and will bring the car to a stop.
The Prius Z has a 360-degree camera, and it’s nicely clear and crisp. The Prius is shown transparently; that’s more handy for off-road use, but still quite neat. There are some other handy features for daily driving. All windows are auto up/down, something I often find useful especially when it’s a hot day and you want to let the hot air out of the parked car ASAP. Speaking of power windows, a feature I’ve never seen before is the “Close Open Windows?” message on the dashboard, when on the motorway. If the windows are open and creating drag on the car, you get this warning message and then you can press the ‘OK’ button to close them all. Cool feature!
There is built-in SatNav in the Signature Class Prius, but like the voice command system, they are not set for New Zealand maps. If you have the Satnav screen up on the centre display, it’s just all white.
The heads-up dashboard is something we’ve seen in Peugeots, where the driver looks above the steering wheel to see the dash, and not through the single-stage heated steering wheel. It doesn’t take long to get used to this but keep in mind, there is no traffic sign recognition in this model Prius.
Audio performance is average at best, bordering on mediocre. It has no substance or depth, but most Uber drivers might not notice.
We covered about 500km in our test Pruis Z, and it averaged a pretty decent 1.5L/100km of petrol, double its suggested WLTP figure of 0.7L/100km but bloody good all the same. In fact, the fuel gauge on our test car didn’t move from full, and we ended with 587km of range when dropping it off.
As far as energy economy goes, our test car managed 17.8kWh/100km. This is middle of the pack for this size and type of car. I do like that on the dashboard, there are left and right arrows for both fuel and battery, so you are reminded which side of the car you need to plug into, or fill up on.
READ ON TO CHECK OUT OUR SUMMARY OF THE 2024 Toyota Prius Z.
2024 Toyota Prius Z – Specifications
| Vehicle Type | 5-door medium hatchback |
| Price as Tested | $52,000 |
| Engine | 2.0-litre, 4-cylinder petrol-hybrid |
| Power, Torque kW/Nm | 164kW (combined) 208Nm |
| Transmission | CVT |
| Spare Wheel | – |
| Kerb Weight, Kg | 1,505 |
| Length x Width x Height mm | 4600x1780x1420 |
| Boot Space / Cargo Capacity, Litres (seats up/seats down) | 284/1,697 |
| Fuel tank capacity, litres | 40 |
| Fuel Economy, L/100km | Advertised Spec – Combined – 0.7 Real-World Test – Combined – 1.5 Low Usage: 0-6 / Medium Usage 6-12 / High Usage 12+ |
| Energy Economy, kWh/100km | Advertised Spec – Combined – 15.0 Real-World Test – Combined – 17.8 Low Usage: 6-10 / Medium Usage 11-19 / High Usage 19+ |
| Towing Capacity Kg, unbraked/braked | NA |
| Turning circle metres | 11.2 Small: 6-10m / Medium 10-12m / Large 12m+ |
| Warranty | 5 Year vehicle warranty 5 years Warrant of Fitness checks 5 years Roadside Assistance 5 year battery warranty |
| Safety information | ANCAP Rating – 5 stars – Link (2022 model) Rightcar.govt.nz – 5 Stars – QHZ823 |
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