Toyota’s unveiled the latest Prius, and boy is it weird.

The fourth generation of Toyota’s iconic hybrid has sharp angles everywhere, and lights apparently thrown on like ninja stars. It’s funky for sure, but it has to be, because hybrids have gone mainstream. They’re no longer radical, or even all that different.

This is the natural order of things; as revolutionary cars mature, they tend to become more conventional in appearance to attract new buyers. That’s what the plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt and electric Nissan Leaf are doing.

Toyota is going the other way. The edgy (and, really, this car is nothing but edges) new look is an effort to stand out again, to reinvigorate sales of a model that has seen its popularity slip in a market that doesn’t place as great a premium on fuel economy. And the Prius always has been, first and foremost, about miles per gallon. It was born of a mandate by the brass to develop a car at least 50 percent more efficient that the fuel-sipping Corolla.

Although Honda was the first to offer a hybrid in the US, Toyota became synonymous with the technology.

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The first generation, a small, almost pedestrian looking sedan, was introduced in 1997. It arrived in the US in 1999, seven months after the first-gen Honda Insight. It garnered some attention from hardcore eco-types, but sales didn’t take off until the second-gen Prius arrived here in 2004. That was the first model to look like the Prius people love (or hate) today. Its 50 mpg stomped the competition, and the car—which earned Toyota a reputation for technological innovation—helped propel the automaker past General Motors to become the world’s largest automaker in 2007. In the past decade, Toyota’s sold 3.9 million Priuses, nearly half of them in the US.

The key appeal of the Prius is that it offers killer gas mileage and practicality for under $30,000. It’s the car you see everywhere (especially on the coasts), the model that launched a thousand Uber drivers’ careers.