2021 Toyota RAV4 Prime: The 302HP Crossover On and Offroad Review

This is the new 2021 Toyota RAV4 Prime. What makes it so special? It's Toyota's first plug-in electric crossover, and it's packing 302 horsepower. We have a full test, including off-road, on this episode of Driving Sports TV. When we first tested the all-new 2019 Toyota RAV4, we were really impressed by the hybrid model. It combined economy and comfort with acceptable all-wheel drive performance, making it a clear choice in the RAV4 family and a solid option when compared against the Subaru Forester, Honda CR-V, and Hyundai Santa Fe. For 2021, Toyota has introduced a new model to the RAV4 lineup. This is the RAV4 Prime. It features all the good stuff you expect, plus a plug-in electric powertrain that makes this the most powerful and economical RAV4 ever made. The base RAV4 Prime SE starts at $38,100. The trim we're testing today is the sporty XSE with premium audio option. This features 19-inch wheels, dynamic navigation, JBL speakers, and blacked-out trim. Prices you see it here? $44,980 including destination. Because this is a plug-in electric, the RAV4 Prime qualifies for the full $7,500 U.S. tax credit, which makes it even more affordable. Up front, the powertrain consists of a 2.5-liter inline 4-cylinder gas engine that outputs a maximum 177 horsepower and 165 pound-feet of torque. This is combined with an electric motor generator that puts out up to 179 horses and 199 torques through an electronically controlled CVT. In the back, a second electric motor provides up to 53 horsepower and 89 pound-feet of torque to the rear wheels independently. Once all the math is done, you're looking at a combined output of 302 horsepower. The included 18.1-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack gives this setup a maximum electric-only range of up to 42 miles. EPA rates it with a combined 38 miles-to-the-gallon on traditional gas and 94 mpg-e, which includes electric operation. More than just a power upgrade, this whole vehicle has been enhanced with modified suspension, steering rack, and additional sound editing to make this the most comfortable and capable RAV4 yet. In the back, a false floor hides a If your commute is less than 20 miles, you could feasibly do the round trip every day, plug in the Level 1 charger for overnight, and it will be ready to go in the morning, and you'll never have to use a drop of gas. If you have access to a Level 2 charger, you can completely recharge the battery in only 2.5 hours. Trunk capacity is identical to the standard RAV4 at 33.5 cubic feet with the second row up. Fold it down for up to 69.8 cubic feet. Passengers get plenty of legroom, plus tilting seat adjustments, a fold-down armrest, and dual charging sockets. Up front in the main cabin, the overall design is still pretty utilitarian. The seats are spacious and comfortable with power adjustments. A panoramic sunroof is available, but ours came with the standard one. Steering wheel is manually adjusted to help you find a good position, and everything from the seat warmer switches to the cup holders are easily accessible. The gauge cluster features a color screen flanked by traditional dials. If you've ever seen a 2019 enough RAV4, this will all be very familiar. On the RAV4 Prime, the infotainment system has been supersized, with an optional 9-inch unit. Of course, this features the same exact graphics as the 8-inch system, and likewise supports the same voice commands. Navigate to the nearest Starbucks. Showing result. To navigate to this point, starting guidance for a new route. The premium navigation system included on our test car features Predictive Efficient Drive, which combines navigation data with driver habits to model the most fuel-efficient routing. It's like having a hyper-miling super-nerd as your co-driver. Even the Aircon is designed around efficiency, with low draw to improve mileage. There is cordless charging available for compatible devices, but if you want to access Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, you'll need to plug in with a USB. The nice thing about cabled CarPlay is that it's fast, easy, and reliable. Shift into reverse, and the screen doubles as a backup camera with dynamic guides. The camera is fairly low-res, which is disappointing, especially compared to some of the competition. Rear auto-braking is available, but it was not included in our test car. That sound you're hearing? Totally fake, from a speaker in the front. This does improve safety for pedestrians, who might not otherwise hear the vehicle coming. Other safety features include blind-spot warning, pre-collision with pedestrian detection, auto high beams, and adaptive cruise control, which we'll get into later. Though most owners will probably charge the RAV4 Prime nightly, it can make its own power using the onboard gas engine. Simply hold down a button to activate charge mode. Likewise, you can toggle the auto button to engage EV or hybrid modes. EV is the default when you start the car. In addition to hybrid, electric, and charge power modes, the Prime also has several drive modes. We'll test those with a simple gravel launch. First, EV and normal. You can see some significant spinning from the front wheels as they scramble for grip. Next, we'll engage the gas engine in hybrid mode, as well as switch the drive mode to sport. This results in a bit more slip in the front wheels, with the rear system still just going along for the ride. Finally, there's trail mode. Let's see what this does. Okay, let's be honest, that's pretty cool. Still not much action from the rear wheels, but look at those front wheels go! It'll be interesting to see just how this translates into real-world performance once we get into the mountains later in this video. Of course, most people aren't going to be taking this into the mountains or hitting advanced trails on it. But one thing they will do is 0-60 because every stoplight is fun. Let's go ahead and stop this. We're going to go put it into sport. I'm in standard EV HV mode, so it'll do what it needs. And complete stop. Three. Oh, let's gate that into sport, too. Three, two, one, go. What? 20, 30, 40, 50, 60. Toyota says this is as fast as a Porsche Macan. Yeah, they went there. And I got to agree that this is fast. Let's do this again. 60 to 80. Boom! Now, you're probably wondering how good does it do 0-60 on electric only? So let's go ahead and give that a try. I'm going to switch it to EV mode. I have it in drive. Let's put it in sport. Actually, we'll put the drive mode into sport as well so everything's consistent with that previous dual mode test. OK, let's give it a shot. Three, two, one, go. Everything flies to the back. 30, 40, 50. It's a little slowing down. And 60. You know, I'm actually really impressed, not with the speed on that 0-60, but the fact that I was wide open throttle and it kept it in EV mode. It, you know, like the standard hybrid, even if you put it in EV mode, if you go wide open throttle, it automatically engages the full system. This one, not so. This, of course, comes with Toyota Safety Sense 2, which gives us adaptive cruise control with lane centering. I simply turn it on, hit go, make sure my lane detect is on. It'll detect the vehicle in front of me. And I can take my my hands off the wheel and my foot off the gas, and it'll basically drive itself. We'll see as it goes around this corner what it will do. See how well it traces. Doing great. OK, now it's telling me to put my hands on the wheel because it doesn't want to do it for very long. But for helping with those long cruises, you can see that this is really a nice system. I've been driving in charge mode on my way up to the mountains because I'm not really looking for economy. What I want is to be able to have maximum electric power on the mountain. So I'm making sure that I top up basically the best I can. Now, we're entering the mountains here with a claimed 25 miles of all electric range, which should be plenty for what we need to do. This vehicle does have up to 42 miles, however, of all electric range. If your commute is under 20 miles, you can easily drive to and from your work every day and not use a drop of gas. That is the benefit and the promise of a plug-in electric hybrid. It has a standard hybrid drivetrain when you need it. And when you're just doing your daily commute, you never have to use gas. But on the weekends, you could drive, you know, 550 miles without a charge, without even adding gas because of the added efficiency. It really is kind of a win-win for everybody's situation. It's a great balance between hybrids, which, you know, get you better fuel economy and are fairly costly, and also then committing to a full electric where, you know, you can't do interstate travel easily with a full electric without making some charging stops. And that just adds significant time, even with a supercharger on the Tesla network, that's still a stop that you wouldn't have to do otherwise. LA to Reading, that's a pretty good range without having to stop for gas or without having to stop for an electric top-up. There's a couple caveats I have to kind of discuss before we take this thing off-road. First off, we are on street tires. These are standard all-season radials. They're Advents, and they'll be fine, I think, for what we're doing today. However, obviously, switching out to KO2s or something like that would give us way more grip. Totally understandable. I do see every weekend up in the mountains, I see people with standard all-season radials all the time. So it's not honest, really, to say anybody who goes on a trail is going to have KO2s. They're just not. I mean, a lot of people buy a vehicle and then they take it up into the mountains, and that's fine because they're just going to trailheads or something like that. Or they get in slightly over their head, which is actually not that uncommon at all, especially out here. Also, this vehicle has 19-inch wheels. 19-inch! That is huge and way bigger than I would like. Now, the 19s are exclusive on the XSE. If you go down a trim level, you get 18s. And I think, actually, for off-roading, that would be the better choice. However, this XSE does look pretty sick on the outside. I think it looks great. So, you know, you kind of got to balance that. Maybe get the XSE and then get a second set of all-terrain tires that have bigger sidewalk. There's the ultimate solution. Okay, let's see what condition. I have not been up here for a few weeks, so let's... They have definitely not patched the roads, that's for sure. Now that we're approaching the hill climb, I'm going to go ahead and turn off charge mode and basically put it into, let's see, auto... Let's just put it in EV mode. Straight-up EV. See how quiet this is. Oh, that's so quiet. I'm going to switch the control panel here. It says that I have 33 miles because I didn't get it fully charged. Let's go ahead and put it into... Yeah, all-wheel drive mode so you can see what it's doing. Whoa, already spinning wheels. Still not putting in that gas motor, though. That's cool. A little momentum over the bump there. Nice. And it detects the slope and it pushes all the power that it can back there to get me up the incline. Very cool. And I'm not even in trail mode yet. I'm just in normal mode. When we get to this next portion, we'll switch into trail and see what it's really capable of. Okay, now time for the first test. This is our rock climb trail and it's kind of tricky, especially because every time we come here, it's a little bit different. It's a fairly popular trail and as vehicles go up and down, rocks could shift it all over. So you can't directly compare this test today with a test from even a year ago. However, it does give you an idea as to what the capabilities are. Now, when I go up this, I am not necessarily going to keep momentum all the way up. I'm going to stop on purpose. And that is to test the all-wheel drive system and see what it does in challenging situations. In a real world, you would try to maintain momentum all the way up. I'm not going to do that today. For the first thing, we're going to go ahead and set up this vehicle. Now, what I really want to do is see how good the electric-only system does on a hill climb. Because that is the party trick of this vehicle, is that it can be all-electric all the time if you drive minimal distances. So I'm going to go ahead and put it into EV mode. Toggle it again. We're in EV mode. Now I'm going to hit trail mode. So now we're in all-electric trail mode. I'm just going to keep the transmission in standard drive and we're going to see what it does. So trail mode allows for a little additional wheel spin, as well as it'll be more aggressive in braking the spinning wheel to redirect power back into the system. Unlike most other all-wheel drive vehicles, the RAV4 doesn't have anything physically connecting the back wheels. It actually has its own dedicated electric motor. And it's the same electric motor in this vehicle as it is in the standard hybrid. However, it has been reprogrammed for this new 2021 Prime release. Also, the front electric motor is 50 foot-pounds of torque more than the other standard hybrid. And that's pretty significant. Now we're going to go ahead and put a wheel up over here, I think. And try to make this challenging for the system. And I'm just crawling along. Okay, now I'm seeing I have this wheel and that wheel are spinning. That's what it's showing me on the gauge. So I'm just going to keep my foot in it. Let it figure itself out. If it can't... It did eventually. And there we go. So this is a little bit different than if you were dealing with a traditional all-wheel drive off-road system. This one, you really want to lay the throttle in because it'll then do all the calculations to try to get you out of the situation. Okay, that was the first challenge. This trail actually is broken down into three challenging sections. We're about to hit the next one. And let's see what this system does. Yep, spinning there and there. Let's see if the system gets us out. We're creating a lot of smoke. I think we need a little momentum here. Man, it is working. 8.3 inches of ground clearance is good. But I still have to be really careful with the approach and departure angles. That said, this vehicle actually has slightly worse departure and approach angles than the Subaru Forester. What are we looking at here? There's a number on that one. Yeah, so this has an approach departure angle in XSE trim of 19.5. Approach, 21.5. Departure. The Forester is 22.9. Approach and 24.6. Departure. That's much better. Bigger numbers are better in terms of those stats. So not exactly ideal in that situation. But I think it's pretty good for most uses. It's definitely better than the Camry, right? For the final challenge, let's take the challenging line into the hole. I'm going to skip this big rock on the left. Hopefully. Oh yeah, lift that rear wheel. Oh yeah, let's see how it does. Okay, that wheel is definitely in the air by several inches. Let's see how it gets out of this. Now we're still in EV mode. Trail and let's do it. Okay, these two wheels are both lacking grip. I'm just going to throttle in and the electric motors pull us out. Come on, you got this. Okay, so I'm definitely burning up these tires. Not good on the tires. So obviously the issue here is grip. We were spinning. We just lacked traction. Now let's go ahead and go down and see what other kind of adventure we can find with this. There is no hill descent control, so I have to manage this with my foot on the brake pedal, which is okay. Again, target market. This is not for extreme off-roading. Although, since they have a trail button, it would have been nice for them to include a... Sketchy. It would have been nice for them to include a hill descent control button, I think. At least give that functionality. Makes you feel a little bit more confident. Okay, we've arrived here at the crosscut climb, but I'm not going to go all the way to the top. And the reason is this is a pre-production vehicle. There's very few of these in the U.S. And if I mess this vehicle up, it's going to be really bad for the other journalists that were supposed to get this. So right now, I'm just going to test it on one of the kind of extreme inclines that's also very slippery. So it could be... It could, in a way, mimic what it would be like to go up a steep hill in the snow. And so let's see what this all-wheel drive system is capable of. And unlike the previous test where I did just electric, this one I'm going to put it into EV slash HV mode, which is kind of the standard hybrid electric mode. So it can decide what it wants to do. Again, I'm going to put it into trail mode so that we optimize traction by being able to shift power around to all four wheels. Let's see how it does. Now, I'm not going to try to use momentum because I want to stress the all-wheel drive system. Traction is an issue, clearly. These tires just are not capable of doing much. What? It's getting up! Yes! Wow, I didn't think that would actually work, but it did. Very impressive. Now let's circle around and head down. Really careful I don't run over anything here. So is this the best RAV4 there is? Yeah, absolutely. I would take this even over the TRD version because this one, it's got the best of everything. Plus, hopefully you actually qualify for tax credits, which means that it's actually more affordable than it may seem. For Driving Sports TV, I'm Ryan Douthit. Thanks for watching. Be sure to subscribe. Leave a comment. Tell us, what do you think of this? Did it meet your expectations or exceed it? Also, be sure to subscribe. We've got a lot of great videos that you won't want to miss. We'll see you again next week.