2022 Cupra Ateca vs 2021 Toyota Prius

What's the difference?

Meet the new Cupra Ateca. Actually, scratch that. Meet the new Cupra, the VW Group's Spanish performance brand that will be launching in Australia around the middle of this year.

Picture a pyramid, and then put VW at the top of it. Bottom left you've got Skoda, a brand that prides itself on practicality and clever features. Bottom right you've got Cupra, which promises to be the fun, sporty and energetic cousin, and to focus on performance, electrified or otherwise. But both are fed from Volkswagen.

Make sense?

The Ateca, then, is a nearly Tiguan-sized SUV that will launch in one hi-po trim level, and a significantly lower starting price than its better-known, R-badged relative.

It also promises to marry family duties with a fun-to-drive attitude. So how does it measure up?

What to say about the Toyota Prius in 2021? A car that was once a technology trailblazer seems now to have become properly retro, even while it’s still being built and sold.

The awkward-looking wedge, an eco-punk icon, not only brought Toyota’s hybrid synergy drive to the masses, it also debuted the brand’s excellent TNGA architecture and set the scene for the company's absurd hybrid success, which now sees the RAV4 version topping the sales charts.

So, after all these years (25 to be precise), is the Prius’s time finally over? Or does this quaint hybrid hero still have more to offer? I took a top-spec I-Tech for a week to find out.