San Francisco
THIS eye-pleasing city has plenty of popular tourist sites as well as a less famous but equally beguiling attraction, the 49 Mile Scenic Drive. This meandering route ties together many well-known landmarks — including Coit Tower, Fisherman’s Wharf and the Golden Gate Bridge — while also venturing into areas seldom featured in travel guides.
Devised to promote the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939-40, the scenic drive originally terminated at the exposition’s fairgrounds on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. Today, the somewhat modified route is marked by signs featuring a sly-looking seagull, which peers down from lampposts across the city.
I’d been meaning to take the drive for nearly as long as I’ve lived here — some 20 years — but until recently I never got around to it. Procrastination was a factor, but it was also a matter of waiting for the right opportunity. Such an occasion finally presented itself a few weeks ago in the form of a test car: an urban-oriented subcompact that could, in theory, complete the 49-mile loop on less than a gallon of gasoline.
The car was the 2012 Prius C, the newest, smallest and — with a base price of $19,710 — least expensive member of Toyota’s expanding Prius family of hybrids. Aimed at young, budget-wary city dwellers, this more petite Prius (the C is for city) deploys Toyota’s gas-electric drivetrain in a sporty-looking four-door hatchback.
On the face of it, a Prius C with a gallon in the tank should be able to handle the scenic drive with miles to spare: its city fuel economy rating is 53 miles per gallon. Toyota says its new hybrid baby has the “highest-rated city fuel economy of any vehicle without a plug.”
Still, I wondered how it would fare on an urban road course punctuated with preposterously steep hills and intermittently horrendous traffic, as well as some less congested stretches of curves and twisties that encourage the right foot to explore its primitive urges.
Unlike its larger sibling, the familiar hybrid now called the Prius Liftback, which has the aesthetic appeal of a slug on wheels, the Prius C is an attractive little car. Where the Prius Liftback is all monolithic planar mass, the Prius C is all curves and flares and bulges. And while the Liftback’s top-heavy look suggests a predilection for straight-line travel, the C’s wide, low-slung, wheels-to-the-corners stance hints at a penchant for playing.
The sense of sportiness continues indoors. The front seats are firm and assertively bolstered, with excellent lumbar support. The thick-rim, flat-bottom steering wheel has easy-to-reach thumb pads for the radio, navigation and climate controls, and for toggling among the hybrid information displays.
The dashboard, clad in handsome plastics, is pleasingly spare and uncluttered. The test car, outfitted at the top trim level (the so-called Prius C Four, with a sticker price of $25,140) featured a touch screen with audio and navigation controls as well as the Entune interface for smartphones.
After examining a map of the 49 Mile Scenic Drive, I chose a starting point: an Inner Sunset gas station, where I would fill the tank before and after. Like all Prii, the C displays trip fuel economy to tenths of a gallon, but I would take a redundant measurement. In the interest of staying on course, I enlisted my wife as navigator in chief, and on a partly sunny, partly foggy, altogether typical San Francisco morning, we set off.
After filling up with regular-grade 87 octane at Seventh Avenue and Lincoln Way and clicking the hybrid system into Eco mode to hedge our bets — it slows the throttle opening and dials back the air-conditioner — we made our way toward Twin Peaks.
At an elevation of 922 feet, it is San Francisco’s second-highest point (after Mount Davidson, not far to the southwest). The road that winds to the top offers panoramic views, and for the skittish, an unnerving proximity to many long, steep drop-offs.
Happily, the car’s handling lived up to its looks, its suspension (MacPherson struts in front and torsion beam in the rear) dispatching curve after precipitous curve with sure-footed confidence — no trace of jitters or notable body roll.
The C’s road-holding ability is aided, no doubt, by the placement of its battery pack: it sits beneath the rear seats for a fairly low center of gravity.
Although the C is almost 20 inches shorter than the Liftback, its width and height are nearly identical to the bigger car’s. The rear seats are more cozy, but for a subcompact the cabin feels spacious. Getting in and out is a breeze, a plus when scenic overlooks beckoned.
After a brief stop at the Twin Peaks lookout, where the test car, in a shimmering blue called Summer Rain Metallic, generated a fair amount of chatter from a gaggle of tourists, we headed back down to the bustle of the city. The long, steep grade offered an opportunity to move the shifter to “B” — for braking — putting the hybrid drive system into a mode that enhances the car’s regenerative energy gathering, banking electrons in the nickel-metal-hydride battery for later use.
The shifter for the continuously variable transmission, by the way, is not the stubby dash-mounted flipper of the Liftback, but a conventional looking lever set into the console between the seats.
On the convoluted streets of Ashbury Heights and the Upper Castro, the Prius C felt decidedly nimble, partly owing to the test car’s optional 16-inch alloy wheels, which come with a quicker steering ratio, and the electric power steering system’s surprisingly convincing simulation of tactile feedback. Steering on the 2012 Prius Liftback, by comparison, feels weirdly abstract, and in a way illustrates a certain metaphysical difference between the two cars.
At the wheel of the Liftback, I could never quite shake the uncanny sensation that it was driving me, rather than the other way around, that I was merely there to help it achieve its uncompromising mission of maximum m.p.g.
The Prius C, on the other hand, despite an identical degree of technical sophistication, never left me feeling like anything less than an equal partner in our brief automotive marriage.
From Ashbury Heights, the route swooped down through the Mission District, then east toward Mission Bay, an area in transition from industrial grit to biotech sparkle. On a section of road under construction, the taut suspension did an admirable job of soaking up bumps while extending an invitation to the sport of slaloming around them.
From Mission Bay, the route zinged over to the Embarcadero, where the driver and navigator stopped at a Ferry Building diner to refuel on veggie burgers and consult the map.
Hunger sated, we set off at a brisker pace, as, two hours into the escapade we still had 38 miles to go. Even in Eco mode, the car has plenty of around-town oomph, not just from its relatively low-torque Atkinson-cycle gasoline engine — rated at 99 horsepower and 82 pound-feet — but also from the 45-kilowatt electric motor that kicks in extra boost.
Toyota states that acceleration to 60 m.p.h. from a standstill takes 11.5 seconds, a leisurely pace. Speed limit signs along the route prevented verification of this number. But like its siblings, the Prius C tends to shift one’s perception of performance from a measure of brute force to one of calculated frugality, to the extent that being smoked by a minivan doesn’t pose a threat to the ego.
The rest of the trip was a blur of starts and stops for photo ops, from SoMa to Japantown, Union Square to Chinatown, North Beach, Fisherman’s Wharf and the Marina. After a dash through the Presidio to the Pacific, our tour culminated in a winding warmdown run through Golden Gate Park.
As we pulled back into our designated filling station, I tapped the steering-wheel-mounted thumb pad to summon the trip odometer, which claimed that in the course of traversing 49.1 miles of San Francisco streets, the Prius C had achieved no less than 53.7 m.p.g.
To test the computer’s math, I refilled the tank using the same pump and nozzle, its handle hooked to the same notch.
The pump shut itself off at 0.858 gallons, which when subjected to some rudimentary algebra, yielded a fuel economy figure of 57.2 miles per gallon.
However you cut it, 53.7 m.p.g. or 57.2 m.p.g. or something in between is quite an achievement. Doing it at a price within striking range of a Ford Fiesta or a Honda Fit is another thing entirely.
INSIDE TRACK: More cute, less filling.