Why is the Toyota Prius expensive to insure? While contemplating a new car purchase this fact has come to my attention (this is in the USA, I think I've heard other places the Prius is cheap to insure).
Below you can see the Prius is near the very top of all cars in the general class of smaller 4-door sedans.
Edmunds.com total cost of ownership, first year of insurance:
$1522 08 kia rio (!) $1497 08 Prius $1393 08 VW Jetta $1384 08 Toyota Corolla $1332 08 Mercury Milan $1323 08 Honda Fit $1179 08 Chrysler Town and Country $1168 08 Chrysler PT Cruiser
I did not rely on these figures alone but have been checking my prospective cars out with various insurance companies, including Geico, my current company (not Geico) and a couple others.
While all these companies had some different ideas about cars in the middle of the list, with significant variations, **they all agree** that the Prius belonged near the very top for most expensive cars to insure (btw, the kia as well seemed to consistently do extremely poorly in this comparison). And the difference was *significant*, similar to the above edmunds listing.
I would have though the Prius would be relatively cheap to insure, so this seems quite irritating. It has anti-theft technology built-in, it is a "family car" largely, it is relatively slow and hence noone is going to buy it to drive it fast at all, etc etc.
Of course the high insurance detracts from the long-term money saving appeal of the car.
Anyone know why it's so expensive? The only valid reason I can think of might be high resale value, leading to high replacement cost value, but frankly I don't really believe that because other cars that go for more, like that Town and Country up there, are very cheap to insure. Of course I've also learned that minivans are about the cheapest vehicles on earth to insure...
Anyone know more about this phenomenon? Are people out here generally aware of this? Anyone think of any aspects of the car that would lead it to have much higher rates?