The Toyota Prius might be the world's best selling hybrid, but it's hardly priced for the masses and, let's face it, besides the short-lived thrill of creeping through parking lots in eerie silence, it has about as much fun factor as a paperclip promotion at a stationary shop.
Yet Toyota feels it's onto a really great thing with this petrol-electric hybrid technology and clearly wants to widen its appeal beyond celebrities and Green Peace officials.
What you see here is the car tasked with doing just that. While its name, Prius C, makes it sound like just another variation of the Prius, this is actually a completely new car, with smaller dimensions and a sportier design that Toyota hopes will make hybrids seem cool among the young at heart. It's certainly among the better-looking hybrids we've seen.
Not only that, but the Prius C will also have a more accessible price and run off a sniff of petrol - with Toyota claiming an urban fuel consumption figure of just 4.7 litres per 100km.
Measuring 3995mm in length and 1695mm in width, the Prius C is only slightly longer than the Toyota Yaris and has the same width.
Naturally it also gets a smaller motor than the Prius, the petrol engine displacing 1.5-litres, but that's about as much detail as Toyota is prepared to divulge at this point.
This shrunken hybrid doesn't appear to have skimped on features in any way, with American market cars fitted with nine airbags and the Entune multimedia system that syncs with smart phones and allows you to do anything from checking live updates on the traffic and weather to booking of movie tickets.
The Prius C will go on sale in Japan next month before being rolled out to the rest of the world early next year, but Toyota South Africa says it's still “under consideration” for our market and can't give us any definite ifs or whens at this stage.