VRROOM WITH A VIEW: Green warrior gets smarter and more practical

YOU reveal a great deal about your character in how you respond to success. People in business tell the same tale — success is something that requires careful management lest, like Icarus, you succumb to hubris and fly too close to the sun.

Sport Minister Fikile Mbalula took credit for the efforts of SA’s Olympians, as you’d expect a man of his character to do. He promised to take R3.5m from his billion-rand budget to pay bonuses to athletes who won medals in Rio. We had the circus, and Mbalula understood perfectly that now was the time for a few crumbs of bread to be dispensed with humour and munificence. It was straight out of the politicians’ handbook.

During his oratory, however, Mbalula did have a revealing "let them eat cake" moment, when he demonstrated the scale of the disconnect between the struggles of the average citizen and the life of our most legendary Cabinet minister. "We can’t have athletes driving a Toyota Yaris. Caster Semenya must be driving a Lamborghini," he said.

I suppose it’s too much for us to expect that Mbalula understands the scale of the damage wrought upon the rand by the administration of which he is a member.

Otherwise, I’m guessing, he might know that a top-of-the-range Toyota Yaris HSD now costs more than R300,000.

This means that of the eight athletes receiving bonuses, only three of them would be able to afford to buy a Yaris with their prize money. And such is the scale of car-price inflation inflicted upon SA by the Zuma cabal’s attempt to wrest the keys to the Public Investment Corporation and, the Treasury from the people who hold them, that should the Rio medal athletes club together with their R3.5m in winnings, they would not get close to buying a Lamborghini.

It is in throwaway comments that the truth is so starkly revealed. His derogatory implications about a car the vast majority of South Africans cannot dream of affording to buy is one of them. It would seem that Mbalula either doesn’t understand what’s happened to SA’s economy and the awful inflation — not only in car showrooms, but also at supermarkets — or he doesn’t care.

To give Mbalula the benefit of the doubt, though, his ignorance regarding spiralling prices is understandable.

After all, he doesn’t buy the cars he is driven around in or the food that he eats.

Contrary to Mbalula’s suggestion, the Yaris is a perfectly good little runaround. The top-of-the-range HSD is a hybrid, which helps to reduce the fuel costs that will no doubt spiral if the Zuma kleptocrats pathetically keep trying to persuade us that the finance minister, and not them, is corrupt. To be fair to Mbalula, he will not understand this because he doesn’t buy the petrol that fuels the cars he is driven around in that he doesn’t buy.

Toyota is a huge employer in SA — a contributor to public life, not a leech upon it — and handles success and winning in a different way to Mbalula. What do you do if you had an idea so brilliant that everybody copied it? When Toyota released the Prius it suffered the misfortune of becoming a virtue totem with which loud environmentalists (tautologous, I know) could show how very committed they were to the cause.

But, over time, many other manufacturers built petrol-electric hybrids. Porsche, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz have all done it.

Toyota has put the same hybrid technology into the Auris, the Yaris and the RAV4 (overseas). They’ve done it because it works.

What, then, for the Prius? Has its time not come and gone? Well, Toyota has obviously had to rethink it. I’m spending some time in the latest model, and can report that it feels like a two-generational leap from the old one. The previous car had its drawbacks — awful interior plastics, nasty cheap rear suspension, and limited space. In placing the new car on the company’s all-new scalable platform, it comes with way more boot space, more rear legroom, and proper independent rear suspension. The result is a much better car.

It rides very well indeed — outclassing some far smarter nameplates on that front — and is entirely pleasant and sensible to live with. The interior is vastly improved, with soft-touch plastics everywhere. It now comes with a head-up display, which helps you monitor energy usage as you trundle along, if you so wish.

It’s spacious and comfortable. My three kids fit in with ease, and we got two bikes and a scooter in the boot with no trouble at all. Fold the seats down and it’s positively cavernous, as we discovered when moving house. What Toyota has done is make the Prius more car-like, more modern and more livable. It is less and less a niche experience.

The US Environment Protection Agency regards the new Prius as the most fuel-efficient car money can buy that doesn’t need plugging in. The fact that it’s as good to drive as any other family car is, therefore, something of an achievement.

There’s plenty of grip and the steering is nicely weighted, if not exactly overly chatty. It looks odd, it is true, but those mad details disguise a sensible family car. It’s not quick, but neither is it terribly slow, and it still has hybrid regenerative brakes, which are grabby and take some getting used to. Nobody is getting that right yet.

People like to talk to me about the car — in car parks and the rare refuelling. Its reputation as a delicate eco-warrior has, I feel, done it nothing but harm.

Yes, it works in the wet. No, you don’t plug it in. Yes, you can drive it on gravel. Yes, I have done so. No, it runs on ordinary 95. No, it’s very easy to drive.

The Prius always was far more ordinary than its reputation. The new model is even more so.

And so on to the unavoidable numbers; in the previous model, in Johannesburg, I averaged 5.5l/100km. Pretty good stuff. In Cape Town, where I drive up and down Kloof Nek several times a day, I’m sitting on 5.2l/100km. That feels brilliant for real-world hilly, urban hard graft. This is definitely a more efficient car.

The battery seems to fill much quicker and last noticeably longer. A criticism would be that this model appears more sensitive to cold starts than the last one. While it gets up to operating temperature quickly, it burns fuel while doing so, requiring a couple of kilometres of driving to recoup the loss.

But summer will soon be here and cold starts will be replaced with hard-working aircon. It’ll be interesting to see what happens.

The current Prius is yours for R446,000 — a few rand less than the outgoing model, after Toyota SA removed some of the expensive specifications, such as sat-nav. It’s not cheap, but have you seen the cost of a Yaris recently — and the other model with the name Mbalula will never say: Aygo?