Normally, minor year-to-year model changes aren’t worth caring about. If it doesn’t change what makes a car go, or how drivers interact with it, does it make a difference? Well, there are exceptions to every rule. Once in a blue moon, a little tweak appears with a new model year, and it’s worth shouting from the rooftops. Here’s one now: For 2025, the American-market Toyota Prius gains something Canada has enjoyed for years.
Now, it’s pretty normal for cars to have different options depending on market. For instance, M Sport bumpers waxed and waned and waxed again from BMW’s North American factory options list in the 2000s, but remained rock-steady in Europe. However, the Prius isn’t getting a feature like that. It’s actually getting a color.
See, the Nightshade treatment of blacked-out accents is coming to the 2025 Prius, and Toyota’s decided to offer this trim in color code 5C5. It’s called Karashi in America, but Canada knows it as Maximum Yellow. Let me tell you: This is the best color you can get on a Prius.
Right off the rip, Karashi or Maximum Yellow or Mustard as it’s known in other parts of the world is bright, but still has just the right touch of orange to it so that it doesn’t come across all aggressive on the eyeballs. It’s a hue that’s happy and optimistic and bursting with the beauty of life.
America has one specific advantage over Canada when it comes to availability of yellow Priuses. Across the Northern border, you can only get Maximum Yellow on the top trims of both the standard and the Plug-in models, meaning the entry point is the Limited AWD model. The U.S.-market Nightshade trim, in contrast, is based on the mid-range XLE trim, and is a whopping $2,870 less expensive than the Limited trim. I’m all for great colors being made available on more affordable trims, and pretty-much-the-middle-of-the-range feels like a great place to put this yellow.
Of course, there’s a little bit more to the Nightshade trim than just the availability of yellow paint. Compared to a Prius XLE, the Nightshade adds black badging, a black antenna, black door handles, carbon fiber dashboard trim, and it also adds the controversial choice of black 19-inch wheels. For fans of silver wheels, that’s not ideal, although it’s a lot cheaper to change the color of a set of wheels than it is to repaint a car.
So, don’t let the black wheels put you off. At $35,030 including freight, the 2025 Prius Nightshade is absolutely the one to have. Just make sure you tick the box for the Karashi paint, and everything should turn out sunny. Aren’t you tired of greyscale everything?
(Photo credits: Toyota)
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Thomas doesn’t mention it, and I can’t find it in any of the comments: is it common knowledge in the US that karashi is the Japanese word for mustard? Sorta weird that just as the US enters its USA! USA! USA! America 1st, Maximum MAGA era, it’s the only market outside Japan that this yellow gets a for’n name??
Put in a request at your dealer now to get one of the 7 they’ll randomly allocate to the US market! Yellow is one of those colors I like to see on someone else’s car as it’s a little much for an everyday driver I have to live with everyday.
I’m with everyone else about the black trim and black wheels. That’s about the only color I hate on wheels more than the black/machine face that somehow went from the Pep Boys discount aisle to everywhere on everything—even exotics—but at least the machined face has some brightness to it and would hide curb rash better. I use stock wheels for the winter tires, so it would be less of an issue for me that these are black, but being 19s is not only dumb for the mileage reduction, but the ride, and there doesn’t seem to be any room to bump up a tire wall size for the winters.