“The Toyota Prius has a long record of excellent reliability.”
Before we bought a Prius I asked around, and found a couple of friends who have had a Prius for years and were onto their second. I kept hearing about their excellent reliability. We therefore bought one. As of today we are well past 100,000 miles and it has been very good so far. We have not noticed any problems with the battery or much else. There was a recall on some part of the electronics but they fixed this for free. In general a hybrid is a rather complex thing so we would prefer to buy a hybrid with a long record of reliability.
We got a Prius V largely to have the extra back seat room for the kids, for example for doing college visits (of which our Prius has done many). It is a larger and heavier car than the regular Prius, but with the same engines. As such the acceleration is limited. However, up in northern Maine where the speed limit is 75 and many drive at 85, it goes from 0 to 85 just fine, and cruises along at 85 (or I would expect 90, had we ever tried it) very comfortably. One issue that we found in the mountains of Vermont or New Hampshire is that due to its aerodynamics it is quiet at high speed, so on the long downhills it is possible for the speed to creep up higher than might be strictly speaking legal without the driver noticing. Thus you do have to watch your speed on the downhills. A nice feature is that if you break lightly on the long downhills it uses the electric motor as a generator and therefore recharges the big battery rather than actually using the brakes.
We are quite happy with it.