Mega-mile Toyota Prius | Shed of the Week

The Prius is about as sought-after as syphilis - unless your single buying criteria is durability, of course...

By Tony Middlehurst / Friday, 5 June 2026 / Loading comments

What is it about the Toyota Prius that makes it so attractive to drivers not just in the UK but all over the world? It can be summed up in one word: longtermreliability. Whether you’ve got three drunks to haul home after a night on the lash or a swarm of piglets to transport across Mongolia, a Prius will see you right.

The Prius experience might not be quite as inspiring as that of a Ferrari 458 Challenge or maybe even a Claas combine harvester, but if you’re anything like Shed you might willingly ditch a dollop of driving satisfaction in exchange for the kind of happiness that comes from high-level dependability and super-low running costs.

Which is why Shed has no hesitation in bringing you the leggiest vehicle ever to grace our Shed of the Week feature, this gen-two Prius with just under 360,000 miles on the clock. That number sounds mad, but actually it’s not particularly exceptional in Prius World. Shed’s normal one-minute research programme revealed the presence of a US-based Prius with 546,000 miles, and that was back in 2024 so who knows what it’s up to now. Responding in the forum to that story, a US auto shop owner claimed that one of his customers had multiple Toyota hybrids with over 600,000 miles on them.

Suddenly 360,000 miles seems like a walk in the park. It’s not though. The normal measure used to describe this sort of thing is circumnavigations of the Earth (14 and a half) or trips to the Moon (all the way out but, inconveniently, only halfway back). Shed however prefers something more relatable. After furiously fingering the beads on the postmistress’s small but perfectly formed abacus, he has determined that by going to a test track and travelling at the Prius’s top speed of 106mph for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it would take almost five months to achieve that mileage.

Obviously you’d have to add some time onto that for tank refills, which takes us into the fuzzier realms of high-speed fuel consumption. Driving this battery-assisted 1.5 litre four pot in a sedate fashion should get you somewhere near the official combined average of 65mpg, but nobody has ever done 106mph in a Prius, or admitted to it anyway, so the mpg figure at that speed is a pure guess. Let’s be generous and say 15mpg. The tank holds 10 gallons, which after a bit more bead-thumbing gives Shed a potential tank range of 150 miles, equal to 2,400 fillups over the 360,000 miles. Even with Bob the Binman carrying out his special high-speed dumping technique in the pits you’d have to allow another three or four days for that.

Back in the real world, our shed has had three owners. The first ten years were quite normal, if anything a little below normal in mileage terms at least with just 57,000 recorded between its 2008 registration and its 10th birthday MOT test in July 2018. Oddly it was tested again just two weeks after that. Clean passes were given on both occasions.

Then the heavy mile-munching began. Over the next five months to November 2018 it managed to click up 16,000 miles. A year later nearly 46,000 more miles had been added, with another 40,000 racked up the year after that, establishing a steady pattern of 35-40,000 miles pa and suggesting that at least two of the three owners were in the meter-flipping game.

We aren’t told about the service history. There’ll be an element of Trigger’s broom in there for sure but the MOT history is remarkable, not just for the monumental mileage but for the fact that there have only been two test fails in all of that. One was four years ago at 215,000 miles for a worn rear tyre, a loose tailpipe and a wonky headlamp pattern. The other was last month for a broken rear numberplate bulb and a wonky headlamp pattern. Those faults were fixed, and by the looks of it all the worn tyres that came up as advisories were replaced at the same time to secure the current clean pass. Both fail certs mentioned also some play in a rod end ball joint, which in his confusion Shed forgot to mention here as he thought it was a fun thing to do in Amsterdam or Redditch.

We’ll let you lot debate the interior condition and the finer details of bio-hazardry involved and leave you instead with the official word for more than one Prius, as determined by the results of a Toyota-organised vote. The answer is not what you just said, but ‘Prii’. Try using that in conversation and see where it gets you.

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