For enhanced safety, the front and rear seat shoulder belts of the Hyundai Ioniq 5 have pretensioners to tighten the seatbelts and eliminate dangerous slack in the event of a collision and force limiters to limit the pressure the belts will exert on the passengers. The Toyota Prius Prime doesn’t offer pretensioners for its rear seat belts.
Both the Ioniq 5 and Prius Prime have child safety locks to prevent children from opening the rear doors. The Ioniq 5 has power child safety locks, allowing the driver to activate and deactivate them from the driver's seat and to know when they're engaged. The Prius Prime’s child locks have to be individually engaged at each rear door with a manual switch. The driver can’t know the status of the locks without opening the doors and checking them.
In the past twenty years hundreds of infants and young children have died after being left in vehicles, usually by accident. When turning the vehicle off, drivers of the Ioniq 5 are reminded to check the back seat if they opened the rear door before starting out. The Prius Prime doesn’t offer a back seat reminder.
The Ioniq 5 has all-wheel drive to maximize traction under poor conditions, especially in ice and snow. The Prius Prime doesn’t offer all-wheel drive.
The Ioniq 5 Limited has a standard Surround View Monitor to allow the driver to see objects all around the vehicle on a screen. The Prius Prime only offers a rear monitor and front and rear parking sensors that beep or flash a light. That doesn’t help with obstacles to the sides.
The Ioniq 5 has a standard blind spot warning system that uses sensors to alert the driver to objects in the vehicle’s blind spots where the side view mirrors don’t reveal them and moves the vehicle back into its lane. Only the Prius Prime Limited offers a blind spot warning system.
To help make backing out of a parking space safer, the Ioniq 5 has standard Rear Cross-Traffic Collision Warning and Rear Cross-Traffic Collision-Avoidance Assist automatically engages the brakes to help avoid a collision. Only the Prius Prime Limited offers Rear Cross Traffic Alert.
Both the Ioniq 5 and the Prius Prime have standard driver and passenger frontal airbags, front and rear side-impact airbags, side-impact head airbags, height adjustable front shoulder belts, four-wheel antilock brakes, traction control, electronic stability systems to prevent skidding, crash mitigating brakes, daytime running lights, lane departure warning systems, rearview cameras and driver alert monitors.
The Hyundai Ioniq 5 weighs 648 to 1353 pounds more than the Toyota Prius Prime. The NHTSA advises that heavier vehicles are much safer in collisions than their significantly lighter counterparts.
For its top level performance in IIHS driver and passenger-side small overlap frontal, moderate overlap frontal, side impact, roof strength and head restraint tests, its standard vehicle-to-vehicle front crash prevention system, its standard vehicle-to-pedestrian front crash prevention system, and its standard headlight’s “Good” rating, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety grants the Ioniq 5 its highest rating: “Top Safety Pick Plus” for 2022, a rating granted to only 128 vehicles tested by the IIHS. The Prius Prime last would have qualified as only a standard “Top Safety Pick” for 2019.