When a car known for environmentally friendliness wants to have a bad-ass look, too

By Gary S. Vasilash

One of the things that the people at Dodge are absolute masters of is taking their existing vehicles and then rolling out “special editions” of them. Chargers and Challengers keep gaining variants while fundamentally staying what they’ve long been.

But that isn’t the only brand in the game.

Toyota is offering “Nightshade” special editions. And the latest to get the treatment is the 2022 Prius.

Although one might imagine that a “Nightshade” vehicle would be black, and while there is Midnight Black Metallic paint available, there are two other colors: Super White and Silver Metallic. So two out of three aren’t black.

But there are black headlight accents, mirror caps, door handles, and the shark-fin antenna is also black.

For the FWD model there are black 17-inch alloys, 15-inch alloys for the AWD model. There are black lug nuts.

This is the fourth generation Prius since the hybrid was launched back in 1997.

While it has the reputation of being the synonym of “green,” evidently Toyota hopes that other colors resonate in the market.