I would like to buy a Toyota Prius, but . . .

Myron_2

MarkyMarkD wrote:

Hybrids are a very complex (and expensive) way of achieving economy which is not much better than a decent turbo-diesel car. If you use it in town all day, the hybrid will win; if you drive on the motorway all the time, the diesel will win as the hybrid doesn't save any fuel over a standard petrol car.

The congestion charge is the ONLY sensible economic reason for running one, as abomb says.

Drivethedeal is a very reputable company, though, as an aside and I've only ever read good things about them.

I don't do a lot of motorway driving. I zoom round town a fair bit, commute ya do when you go to the office and back. Actually, I currently own a J-plate Rover 218SLD Turbo and I've recently managed to get 51mpg on a journey. The lowest is 40mpg. Guessing at an average, I'm managing 45mpg per fill-up. Every time I fill the tank I take the details and feed it all through a spreadsheet so the mpg figures are actual and not estimated.

Actually, between 9/9/2005 to 16/10/2005 is 44.6mpg.

Some of the homework I've done with the Prius shows a 8 year warranty for all the electrical stuff, 3 years for the petrol engine. Yeh, and the usual 100,000 and 60,000 miles respectively, whichever comes sooner.

I don't buy on impulse. Keep the tips and tricks flowing. Anything that will help me make the right decision must be good. Especially that fuel prices are rising and there has already been an admission that there ain't enough desiel refinaries in the UK to cope with the rise in diesel vehicles on the road. That's the fact/excuse for diesel prices being higher than Petrol.

I really looking at the every cost angle. From mpg to servicing and trying to predict in 8 years time, will Hybrid vehicles keep their value because the UK will be importing more and more crude as our oil fields quickly run dry.

All comments welcome. Please keep them coming!

Myron_2

blue_haddock wrote:

Personally i would go for a 1.4 D4D diesel Corolla over a Prius, the corolla will give better miles to a gallon and be a hell of a lot cheaper than the Prius for initial purchase and also for servicing.

Have a stab at guessing the future. I'm curious what you personally think of how diesel vehicles will hold their price, with governments favouring hybrids and alternate fuel.

I'm guessing that the Corolla you mention might have a VED of about £160 per year? Hybrids have a VED of £65 per year.

The choice I have to make ain't going to as easy as I thought...

wazza

could you put a link to the official uk pirius forum. am intrested in learning if there are any problems with it long term

Myron_2

Okay... If you go to http://www.toyota.co.uk/ and then select the home page for the Prius, there is a link to the Yahoo group for UK discussions and also a link to a US forum, but to short cut the visit to Toyota's site, the official (or Toyota approved) discussion forum is at http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/Prius-UK .

You need to register for (free) membership. There is a mention that the original Prius group got spammed out. You'll be reading the archives for quite a while. It's quite an active discussion group.

blue_haddock

Myron wrote:

Have a stab at guessing the future. I'm curious what you personally think of how diesel vehicles will hold their price, with governments favouring hybrids and alternate fuel.

I'm guessing that the Corolla you mention might have a VED of about £160 per year? Hybrids have a VED of £65 per year.

The choice I have to make ain't going to as easy as I thought...

The 1.4 D4D is in the lower tax bracket which off the top of my head i think is £115, it would also be considerably cheaper to purchase. It will be easier to resell in the future too. The combined fuel economy for the diesel corolla is 58.9mpg and having driven both i would say the diesel econnomy figure is more realistic than the figure stated for the Prius. Whenever i have driven aprius i have struggled to break 50mpg - they are a very heavy vehicle for their size (due to batteries, electric motors etc) and unless you are extremely gentle driving them you will not achieve that consumption figure.

Whilst the government are paying lip service to alternative fuels and hyrbrid vehicles most of the public are sceptical - it would be nigh on impossible to sell a prius with only a year or two left on the hybrid part of the warranty. The original Prius model are now almost unsellable, even dealers do not want to touch them, this model is miles better than the old one but i don't think the residuals will be that great on them.

Myron_2

Thanks blue_haddock. Thanks for the info.

I wish to do this out of sheer curiosity. Yes, I'm going to test drive a Corolla diesel, but for the fun if it have a test drive of the Prius. As time goes by it is sinking into my head that the Prius is, to an extent, an over complicated machine.

Can you, or anyone else, give me references to information regarding problems selling the Prius on. I take it that at the moment the mark one Prius is virtually being given away?

You see, I would like to confront the dealer with this information and see what response I'll get.

As to Diesel or Hybrid, and I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, I've heard on the TV news some time ago the fact/excuse that the cost of diesel is rising fast because more and more people are buying diesel powered vehicles the the capacity of the refineries here in the UK is being maxed-out, where it seem the capacity for producing Petrol is fine.

Another thing that I'm keeping in mind that maybe a Corolla can average (guesstimate) out at 58mpg and the Prius at 55mpg, I'm also keeping in mind the cost of fuel.

If I could get 55mpg out of both cars, with the same sized fuel tank, the hybrid will end up being cheaper to run.

Also, I tend to keep hold of my cars. The only reason I'm looking at the possibilities of getting another car is that I plan for one time in my life to own a brand new car and secondly my 1990 registered Rover has this cancer of the body called `rust`, even though the running gear and the engine is working as when I purchased it for £700. I'm still averaging about 44mpg and in a few cases on motorway runs I've managed to still get 50mpg or over.

I think it's time to hit the AutoMart to see what Priuses are being sold for, but I have no interest in the mark one Prius, which does validate your statement; "The original Prius model are now almost unsellable".

At the moment, it seems roughtly, that diesel engined cars cost the same to fuel-up as petrol engined cars. Lord knows what the government will do to fuel prices in the future.

Looks like it's a gamble between choosing a diesel or a hybrid.

From all I've read it seems the general consensus is if a fair amount of mileage is covered then diesel's come out best, but if it's down to a lot of stops and starts and general "going to the corner shop" and "visiting friends" with the occasional long journey then the Hybrid wins. Is my reasoning correct?

I will continue doing my homework.