Storming Sweden in the World's Wildest Prius

The 4 batteries used to power that system are likely Optima Yellow Tops. Those are hefty and will add another 100lbs to the gross vehicle weight. All those speakers, monitors and wiring will likely add another 200 or so lbs to the mix. And presumably there is a different, now Hi Amp alternator (or two) drawing upon the gas 4 cylinder portion of Toyota's mighty Synergy Drive. The weight of this extra gear and new draws on the gas engine cuts this guy's mileage in the Prius by 10-20% at least. If you don't want to be boring in a Prius, it may cost you some mpgs.
I think a better choice for the Prius would have been a custom "designer" paint job in the spirit of the type that Roy Lichtenstein used to do on BMWs. I'd even go for something similar to 70s era Van artwork. Paint is a relatively lightweight addition and is perhaps entertaining for other drivers (unlike some guy's 4400W boom-boom system)

All that money and not a word about the drive train? I'm going to guess that there's not a lick of change to drive train so while the cars got bags of show it's got no more, and quite possibly less, go then a box-stock Prius. What a waste.

I understand the concept of pimping a car to make it look better, but they definitely missed the ball on the whole premise behind a Prius.

Like Chris/Allen said, a ton of extra weight, most likely no additional improvements in the drive train or energy storage...

Kinda self defeats the whole purpose behind a Prius in the first place, and you'd figure if you had dished out $185k, you could've pulled the power train from a Tesla while you were at it.

i'm......so.....confused....

uuuh, im pretty sure their reason for doing this was to make a show car. it was created specifically for a tv show.

however, i think this thing actually looks worse now than it did stock. that rear end is soo ugly.

the paint though, looks good to me

still a stupid little car

You are all wrong. With this car you can pick up hippie chicks or shallow golddiggers.

YEAH! Rich people doin' stuff! Always interesting!

That is one ugly car.

Well it looks ok, but I've never been able to fit in one of those. They are not made for tall people... They are not made for tall people.

I could do better with a $1,000 junker. Just keep the car as is and add a suitcase with $183,275 to the interior. Now that's my kind of car.

lame. just lame.

It's still not cool.

the prius is god-awful ugly, something needs to be done about it. this might not be it, but i applaud them for doing something.

I'm not often so negative, but my vote is with everybody who said ugly. Paint job is ok, but the dark design on the front fenders made it look like it was already in an accident in some of the shots. The cut-out at the rear-end looks crude, including the Toyota logo I'm guessing they made themselves.

@Joe: No you can't pickup hippie chicks or golddiggers in this car. The hippie chicks won't wait around for you to get that oh-so-cool door open. Put a golddigger in that car and it will bottom out.

What did it do to the gas mileage? The Prius has that shape for a reason -- low drag.

I thought you can't modify a Prius because it will reduce its effectiveness as a Hybird? For $184,275 I would definetely bought a Tesla instead (even if it is as ugly as the Prius). I don't understand tuners sometimes. Trying to turn an ugly car into and uglier car that cost more.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Modified Prius FTL

"The goal ... was to give the viewer a great show and, second, to show that a Toyota isn't a boring and anonymous car,"

Maybe the first goal was achieved (I haven't seen the show), and I guess the second was achieved (like a wrecked car is no longer anonymous as people rubberneck their way past it).

Sport seats in a stock Prius drivetrain loaded down with several 100 extra pounds of weight??!! LOL!

"Storming Sweden in the World's...(fill in rest)"
...most pathetic $184,000 modified Prius"

Pfffttt it is sometimes scary and depressing to read many peoples comments and realize how locked in our own little worlds we are! I have a lot of work to do! And so does the rest of us

THAT IS SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO GAY!!!
Why dont they put that money into something worth a damn, like a classic American muscle car!! What you expect they are European!!

Only WIRED would feel they need to report on something this stupid and pathetic! This magazine continues to get worse by the day!!

Tell me what I am missing. They needed 4 batteries used to power the system. Isn't this a mostly electric car? Why not tap into the onboads? A case of the ME vs. EE maybe.

lame

So what? did they get the guys from Pimp my ride or some thing? yuk

..."took top honors in the eco-car division." Seriously?! I'm all for making green cars more cool but throwing out perfectly good stuff for other stuff that just looks different doesn't qualify for eco-friendly in any intellegent mind.
Of course, under $200,000 for a whole bunch of media coverage is probably a good spend though ;)

Pimping the car actually made it look like a trash.

Before I bought a Prius last December, I always said that "it's so ugly, that only its mother can love it. Now, with gas in California circa $4l.00/gal, all I'll say is that I smile every time I take it to the gas station. Yes . . . averaging 47 mpg.

Uh, so, what do you call a hybrid rice-burner?

Before it was just a hybrid. Big deal. But now... it's just calling out for degradation and insults. ;-)

I am a bit supprised they used add-on batteries. The Prius drive-train battery has 30 HP (22.5 KW) of power. They could have just gotten a big 110-240 VAC to 12VDC switching power supply. Would have been allot lighter than 4 Lead-Acid batteries. Take out the rectifier,and feed the battery DC to the switchers, and your done. In fact this is how the Prius powers its own 12 V accesories, although that power supply is limited to about 1KW.

People have actually run houses during power outages on large Computer UPS that use 200 V DC batteries (110 V AC recified floats around 170 V DC) hooked to a Prius battery. As the drive train battery discharges, the engine coms on automatically and charges its back up.

As an auto upholsterer that has done a number of first in class show winning restorations and hot rods, the interior is truly tacky. They could have done better with seat covers from JC Whitney.

A quarter mile of audio cable is basically impossible; I have no clue what they did to the car, but you'd have to run circles of cable around the car and have dozens of speakers to run up 1250 feet of audio cable.

UUUUGLY and missed the point. Should have gone with a different car.