Does the Toyota Prius Really Look That Great? We Asked Tomorrow’s Car Designers
Who better to ask than the aspiring students at the ArtCenter College of Design?
Wow, these students are next-level. I’m just an automotive journalist and a wannabe car designer with a 2024 Toyota Prius Prime, but the students I’m with represent the future of automotive design. There’s a real chance the car you drive in 20 years will have a design influenced by folks in this group. So, what may look like just a 2024 Prius with some students in a design studio is much more.
This is the renowned ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, and we’re about to hear what tomorrow’s car designers think of the design of the 2024 Toyota Prius. Will it make as much of an impression on them as it has on the MotorTrend staff?
Good Design Shouldn’t Cost More
Inside the new Mullin Transportation Design Center, students of this Visual 3 class see details before a more mainstream audience would. Each detail may not be significant on its own, but excellent design combines good ideas into something that stops you in your tracks. If you aren’t one of these future designers, you might not know why a good design affects you, but that second look in a parking lot says everything.
Here, there’s some agreement that good design shouldn’t require a high entry price, and some feel the 2024 Prius is a great example of that. Big-picture, it comes down to proportions and stance.
Parked just a few feet away from a mahogany wood buck for a 1939 Bugatti Type 64, the 2024 Prius’ design looks purposeful even standing still. One student refers to the Toyota’s “beautiful Coke-bottle shape,” referring to the way the car’s sides are pulled inward between flared fenders front and rear.
Prius vs. Crown?
A low H-point also makes the 2024 Prius’ stance possible. Put another way, the Prius has a lower seating position, so your hip isn’t high off the ground. Think of the Toyota Crown, an unconventional sedan whose niche centers on offering a higher seating position with an SUV-like ease of entry. By contrast, the Prius goes low. Taller and older drivers will feel like they’re not only pulling themselves out of the car, but also up more than they might in other cars and SUVs.
This sports car-like driving position allows designers to bring the roof a bit lower. It’s a sleeker look that was described in ArtCenter’s studio as confident, like a car that can handle itself.
Daring is how professor Leon Paz describes it. The Prius design has a sensuality to it, he says, and he notes that such an extreme windshield rake is “not easy for the plant or engineer.”
Details That Work and a Couple That Don’t
What a time to appreciate new car design. That there’s a place for ostentatious designs like the Cadillac Lyriq, the retro-modern Hyundai Ioniq 5, and the more restrained Toyota Prius says a lot about our choices today.
The Prius is more Ioniq 5 than Lyriq in its visual restraint, something one student notices. It’s an especially apt observation when you remember the previous Prius was deemed so off-putting to some that “its legitimacy as a [2017 Car of the Year] candidate was given an immediate pass.” Clearly, things have come a long way since then, as the new Prius became our 2024 Car of the Year.
The way light reflects on the Prius’ less-is-more surfacing was another topic of conversation; not something you often hear from consumers. That’s why design studios often have private courtyards—offering enough natural light for studying models but not so much that anyone outside the company can take an unauthorized sneak-peek.
The Prius' use of gloss black—both on the fenders and as an accent on the 2024 Prius Prime XSE’s wheels—was the almost-instant answer to the question, what don’t you all like about the design? On the Prius and RAV4, Toyota uses gloss black fender trim to denote the plug-in hybrid models’ elevated status and cut the visual weight of the car from the profile view. Gloss black trim also appears on the center console and on the wheels. Altogether, the effect, for these young designers-in-training, was negative, especially on the wheels, where they felt it made the car look cheaper.
I’ve never been a fan of the gloss black trim on the center console inside the car, but don’t mind the trim on the fender flares. I do agree with one of the young designers that the wheels look flat. Not a big deal, though—any more dimensionality might impact aerodynamics and, as a result, fuel economy and driving range.
