What 14 owners told NHTSA about the 2018 Toyota Prius Prime

On at least 4 occasions when the EV battery becomes depleted while driving at highway speeds and the car is switching to gas, the engine completely loses all power. This has lasted from 10-30 seconds. The dealership said a small battery needed to be replaced, and replaced that, but this recurred within a month of replacement.

NHTSA ODI 11723385

Take foot of break, car accelerates under power. Sooner or later, this is going to result in killing a pedestrian. The question has been for the last year, is this a behavior that can be gotten used to. The answer is definitely NO! This resulted in a near collision with a pedestrian today. Toyota believes the behavior is intentional and will not confirm the safety issue. Farmers Insurance is willing to believe the issue exists without inspection but has no idea what to do. You have a problem on your hands. Biden is trying to transition almost everybody away from gasoline vehicles; thus those that drive manual transmissions will be driving electric vehicles, and their brain patterns have not changed and the procedure for getting rolling from a dead stop will be done the old way, and it's now dangerous. In a manual transmission it is necessary to transition off the break before completing looking all three ways (left, right, straight) because the transition time from break to power is so long that if the looking is done before, it is out of date by the time power is being applied. Applying the same procedure to an electric car has potentially lethal results; and people who have been driving a manual transmission for a long time will end up using its procedure in an electric car by habit. Perhaps you observed the reports over the last few decades of old men with new cars having unintended acceleration problems with no cause found. I now believe that a number of these have a very similar explanation. Car isn't off, take foot of break to get out of car, car accelerates. In an electric car, telling the car isn't off isn't very easy any more. This is easy to understand. An automatic transmission vehicle has an unremovable dumb behavior where take foot off break accelerates, whereas in a manual transmission this stalls, which is a safer result. There is no reason this behavior should carry over to computer drive, including electric or hybrid vehicles.

NHTSA ODI 11517150