How is something like this road legal? Is there no regulatory body to control things like this? Can people just slap a motor on wheels and drive it on public roads in the US?
Pretty sure this is photoshopped. There isn’t a Prius that has an uneven window like that middle one.
I’ve owned several Prius models and it looks fake to me. I can’t see where the middle door could come from.
The downward indented window does not exist.
Look at that wobbly roofline too.
The Prius limo gets around.
Also, the Prius in your photo is the body style that came after this body style.
And when you have a welder and metal fabrication tools, you can make any weird shit you want. Including that step-up window.
What you’re mentioning is actually the very thing that makes this photo credible.
Notice how in the original Prius the bottom window line is sloping downward, it’s not parallel to the ground.
To squeeze a door between the other two and not break the design by leading the line in an odd angle, they had to introduce that ramp in the middle.
Apparently this very vehicle does in fact exist. Or if it doesn’t, the idea has been stolen by several others and reused verbatim, including the wonky middle doors.
See also this lineup of Google results.
Stretched limousines exist by this very method. I’m Australian but the concept wasn’t started here. https://www.belle.net.au/building-a-stretch-limousine/
Edit:
We do know of limousines that have been shipped back to the USA for failing to meet Australian standards.
I’d say it’s easier in many American states.
No, it’s almost certainly not legal. However it’s plausible that he just registers it as one of the 2 destroyed cars. It’s still “a prius” and could probably slide under the radar.
There are companies that do this legally for limmos. I don’t know how easy it is for “some guy with some tools” to do it legally.
In the EU, if some abomination like that enters the peripheral vision of a police officer, prepare your car to be impounded and ground to dust a week later.
It’s up to the states to regulate, and states don’t usually bother. It’s ended in tragedy before, I can’t find a follow-up story so I guess nothing was actually done in response to the tragedy in the article? Seems like a very American response.
