The Prius isn’t Toyota’s best-selling (yet) or oldest nameplate, but it’s a car that crafted a new niche in its segment and single-handedly made hybrids popular all over the world, forcing many other carmakers to follow the Japanese brand’s lead.

Every generation of the Prius (there have been three up until now), improves upon the previous and increases its market share, and we don’t expect anything less from the new model that should arrive by 2015.

The crew at KGP Photography nabbed one of the early prototypes of the 4th generation Prius on film. There’s too much camouflage to be entirely sure about the design details, but the shape of this test car is if not identical, very close to the current model. We must note, however, that this may not be the finalized body.

The spies were able to sneak up to the window and capture a glimpse of the interior that brings a major change compared to all other previous generations – the repositioning of the instrument panel from on top of the center stack to in front of the driver. The new dash appears to carry over several elements from the Prius’ sister model, the Lexus CT200h, like the center air vents and air-conditioning system, but we’re not entirely convinced that this is the case.  To explain, if you take a closer look, you’ll see that Toyota’s engineers have used a few blocks of tape under the center section of the dash to hold up different plastics and knobs, which could very well mean that what we’re looking at here could be a test mule for the interior.

Toyota hasn’t revealed anything about the next Prius hybrid powertrain, but a recent report from Autonews suggested that the Japanese carmaker may opt for the use of lithium-ion batteries instead of the current model’s nickel-metal hydride batteries.

Video Credits: KGP Photography/YouTube

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