After the debut of the 2017 Prius Prime at the New York Auto Show last spring we’ve been waiting patiently to drive the new Super Prius, the plug-in ultra extendo range one with all the goods.

That day has come and in our first drive we find that like the Prius Liftback its based on, it offers a worlds apart driving experience and form than the last generation Prius Plug-In.

This time around, Toyota wanted to really step it up and give the Prius faithful not only more bragging rights for their money, but something more substantive than just a badge on the rear hatch and some new specs to chat over at the water cooler.

Here they’ve given it Prime nomenclature that goes along with entirely different styling front and rear. Much more than a different grille treatment, the Prime has a unique hood that wraps over the sides to meet unique fenders with a completely different set of lines.

The front fascia is more akin to the Toyota Marai but in this case far more handsome. A sculpted two level grills has a translucent panel with some slick pattern work behind it book-ended by some very sexy quad beam LED headlights.

There’s stacked LED lights as well along with larger gills and grilles that I honestly think looks so much prettier than the Prius Liftback. Wheels too are unique to the Prime, 15-inch alloy with wheel covers.

At the rear, a dual wave rear glass has curvature that flows down into the rear deck that features a very artfully conceived tail light treatment that reminds you of Aunty Edna’s glasses. It provides an interesting view through the rear view mirror too. To save weight, the hatch frame is actually made of carbon fiber, something you can see and feel when it’s open.

Moving to the interior, Toyota gave upper trim grades of the Prime an 11.6-inch portrait style touchscreen display. Replacing a number of traditional knobs and switches, it houses controls and content for most every infotainment and driver information set you’d expect and then some.

Visibility is excellent most of the time as its bright background setting helps allay sunlight glare. Graphics are good and it features a nice rotating center menu with bubble style floating action that’s kinda cute while also being easy to navigate.

For our short brief drive I didn’t get to play extensively with it, but found it very pleasing and easy to pickup and I’m not usually a fan of the all-glass control format.

The rear seat does come in at one less passenger with the Prius Prime, now a four-seater with a center console between the two rear passengers. This is because of weight the large extra battery pack in the rear more so than packaging.

On packaging, the larger 8.8 kWh lithium-ion battery does eat into the rear cargo area a bit lifting the floor up a couple inches higher and negating any possibility of a spare tire. These are the prices you pay for skipping the gas station.

And that gets us to what motivates the Prime. The powertrain itself is mechanically identical to the Prius Liftback with its 121 system horsepower with one key exception. Here it has a two-motor drive capability for when you are driving in EV only more. It uses both motor generators to power the car in EV mode, something the Prius Liftback cannot do.

EV Range you ask? It can travel up to 25 miles on a full charge, and it can achieve speeds up to 84 mph in EV mode. We’re told the the two electric motors together create 75 kW which works out to about 100 horsepower.

Toyota tells us it’s rated at 124 MPGe with a 54 mpg combined rating in hybrid mode. These numbers put the Prius Prime much closer to the Chevrolet Volt now than before. But with pricing to start at $27,100 for the Prius Prime, it will represent a much better value than ever.

In our driving we found it accelerated and handled much like the new Prius Liftback upon which its based. It’s about 300 pounds heavier than the Liftback but handling doesn’t seem to suffer. Our unscientific 0-60 testing was in the neighborhood of 11 seconds in hybrid mode and 15 seconds for EV mode.

In all we came away impressed with the overall driving experience on our windy back road routes. It makes us think how much has changed when you can fling a Toyota Prius around in the curves and actually have some fun.