> Another reason for buying a hybrid, of course, is that you do the sort of
> driving that will be more economical with a hybrid. That would be heavey
> stop-and-go use for many miles over the course of a year. If you have a bad
> commute, a hybrid may be the car for you.
>
Or better yet, move closer to your job, that is what a lot of people do and it works pretty well. It even helps to save the planet since your driving less.
Yet another valid reason for buying a hybrid is that you expect the price of
> gas to rise to the point where driving a hybid will be economical. >
But you see that won't ever really happen, not for a long long time. The reason is that if the price goes up, it makes stuff like oil shale become economically viable to recover oil from. And we have gobs more oil tied up in reserves that are a bit more expensive to recover oil from than just drill and hold out a bucket.
So yes, the price could go up another 100%. But if it went up something really significant, like 1000%, then the other uneconomically viable reserves would suddenly become viable and go into production, and the price increase would halt.
> Or you just want to own something different.
>
Try a motorcycle or a bicycle.
> And, of course, owning a car and being able to sell it a couple of years
> later for nearly what you paid is rather nice, too. Resale value counts for
> the average working stiff, too.
>
They only have high resale value now because most owners are still under the original, long, factory warranty so a buyer knows that if something major is wrong with it when they buy it, they can get it fixed for free.
And, while many people do take a critical look at the price and the forecast
> savings and do decide to buy a convenitional car, well they came into the
> hybrid's dealership to look, didn't they? Did they stay to buy the
> conventional vehicle? What's it worth to get a prospect in the door? >
That is not how an increasing number of people buy new cars these days. Gone are the days that most car buyers would go down to the local dealership and just spend the day being sold to. More and more of them are doing their homework on the Internet first and have a clear idea of exactly what they want before walking in the dealership's door.
I've checked the auto ads in the local paper the last few weeks running.
> The local Toyota dealers run no ads in the local paper. I wonder why? Must
> be that they get a steady stream of visitors without advertising. How can > that be?
>
Maybe they have done some analysis of their newspaper ad buys and found out that those ads don't generate enough sales to make them worthwhile. If I was a car dealer I'd probably be putting most of my ad dollars into tv ads and radio, not newspapers.
If we check AutoNews.com, we find that, in 2005, the Toyota Prius outsold:
> the Saturn Ion; the Buick LaCrosse; all Mercedes cars combined; the Dodge
> Magnum; all Lincoln-branded cars combined; the Mazda 3; the Mazda 6; all the
> Saab cars combined; the Nissan Maxima; all Mitsubishi cars combined; the VW
> Jetta; the VW Beetle and the VW Passat combined; the Monte Carlo and the HHR
> combined; and, I'll stop here, all the Volvo cars combined. I expect the VP
> that launched a "specialty" car that outsold all those would find that he
> wasn't in immediate danger of dismissal.
>
So much for wanting to own something different. Isn't it amazing that a Prius proponent such as yourself can say on one hand the Prius is great because everyone is buying them, and on the other hand say the Prius is great because hardly anyone is buying them?
What's your source for "four to seven thousand dollars" for the battery
> pack, anyway? I heard it was well under two thousand and Toyota warrants it
> for a long time, besides. Common sense says it's not all that much, as such
> a "four to seven" thousand dollar part would drive the purchase price of the
> car way up. At $21,000, the Prius isn't really all that expensive. It's
> about $5K more than a Corolla but it has more features and I believe it's
> more comfortable. The base MSRP on the conventionally powered and largely
> unimaginative (still OHV? That is so Fifties) Impala is almost that much, > anyway:
>
formatting link
> I'll bet that the operating cost on the Prius is lower than that of the
> Impala, anyway.
You see this is the problem, "you bet" You frankly don't know, and you don't know because the Prius hasn't been out that long.
once we see a lot of these Priuses hitting 200K miles we will have enough data to make a judgement as to whether the operating cost of the Prius is lower over the lifespan of the car, than the operating cost of the regular car..
Ted