Why not get a Corolla?

If you want good gas mileage and technology scares you enough to suffer in a cramped up little car that feels like a little car, then the corolla may be a good option.

But if you want to get as nice a car as you can find and have good gas mileage too, then the prius.

Is the tail before the horse or the horse before the tail?... Well its according to whats the horse and whats the tail?..... Whats your priority.... neither one is wrong.. just different...

IMO.... with the tax credit to consider, the extra mpg, and the extra comfort and goodies, you are getting much less car for the buck than with a prius.

 

Corolla v. Prius

My last car was a Lexus IS300. I prefer the Prius (HSD aside) because it is roomier, a bit quieter, and has better visibility.

It is not as decked out and the f&f are a bit -- and only a bit -- less refined. The handling is not as good as the Lexus but in my riding life I rarely if ever have a chance to appreciate those differences. Add in the hybrid factor and the Prius is clearly my choice.

Corolla, OTOH, is less refined than either, noisier than both, and lacks any sort of "panache" if that matters (OK, it matters to me a little ). It lacks hybrid benefits. I think it is a great car but in a utilitarian sort of way - like the kind of car you buy for your college kids.

I guess I think that the Prius and Lexus are more alike than the Prius and Corolla.

 

holy moly this thread sure did a little transmorgrifying. Wow

 

I agree. The prius is surprisingly upscale. I guess Toyota is trying to really push the HSD by having a very high quality car as the first model. That said I wish they did a Lexus HSD... and no the 400h is not good enough!

Oh! And mercedes should pay attention... the hyrbids might now be the sporties thing to drive (due to extra weight) but they are sure queit which seems to be a hall mark of Lexus and Mercedes.... I would dig it!

 

Yeah VW/Audi engines don't seem all that reliable. A friend had his 1.8T Passat Wagon's timing belt crack (long before maintainence interval) forcing an engine rebuild and the car was never the same. He also had queit high cost for parts breaking

Another friend with an 1.8T Audi A4 seem to have a lot of engine trouble as well (most seemed out of warranty)

I thought the VW looked cool but maintainence seemed to high for me.

 

my husband has been driving 87/88 camrys with 250k+ miles on them for years. buys them for $1000, puts $300 into em, drives for 5 years. repeats the process. toyotas are very reliable overall. and if you do some digging you'll see the prius maintenance schedule is minimal except for the larger intervals (like 30k and such)

 

that is soo cool. We where talking about something similar at lunch. My 10 year old Maxima is not as reliable as I want it to be and since I don't do (any) service myself it's too expensive to keep running (I've put something like $2500/year into it for the last 2 years). But still it runs fine (123.000 miles) and is queit comfy. If I could repair my own car then it wouldn't be a bad idea to buy a 10 year old car and put a limit for how much to put into it (say 1500) and then buy a new one. It would be DIRT cheap!

In the end I want and can afford reliability so I go for something newer. If it wasn't for the Prius I would have gone for a 2-4yr old car at this point.

 

As for the batteries, I will address the issue by saying that another very common myth is that hybrid batteries will die after a few years. Most people think this way because when they think of batteries, they think of the ones in their laptop, their iPods, or their cell phones which crap out after use... and so they equate those problems with the hybrids...

That is also not true. There is a huge difference between those electronic devices and the Prius... You, the user, have to charge those devices yourself, while for the Prius, the computer takes care of the whole thing by itself.

When you have an electronic device like a laptop, 9 times out of 10 the battery is either completely charged and pinned at 100% because you have it plugged in, or it's at 0% because you let it discharge all the way... These two extremes are bad for battery health and reduce the life of the battery, but those are, unfortunately, the two most common states when you let the user charge the battery.

The Prius charges the battery whenever it needs to... it burns gas if the battery is too low to charge it, and it uses more electricity to discharge it if the charge is too high... it keeps the battery at about 60% charge, the best place for it for battery health, most of the time when you are driving.

Now this leads into the plug-in hybrid issue well... there is a technical problem with plug-ins... that by letting the user charge the batteries, there is the risk of reducing battery health by again putting the task of charging in the hands of the user instead of the computer.

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Not to get of topic but I don't agree with this. Plug-in Hybrids would work just as the Prius. At night it would ensure it would charge to what ever "full" means for the Prius (with a larger battery) then it would stop. It would then use the battery as much as possible until it felt it reached either too much load or the battery would become "low" (as a prius defines it). At either point it would kick in the ICE. So a plug-in hybrid should be as smart as the Prius is today.

In an EV only car this could be a problem as the car would probably choose to continue to drive even as the battery was running low (to extend the range) this could maybe age the batteries faster.

 

it does work out quite well. balances out the cost of the tools he has to buy, since by using them we end up having one sorta-big car payment for him every 5 years or so
it helps that he's got all the nice equipment at the shop to use, a lot of the stuff he does would be a serious pain to do in a driveway which immediately discourages a lot of people. and really, parts aren't the expensive part of the repair bill. it's the labor that kills ya in the end... in most cases. if you can spend the time doing it yourself instead of the money it's a real money saver.

we had thought of buying, fixing, and selling camrys for some extra cash, but he's so busy at work that it wouldn't have worked out.

 

Yeah, The problem is space (I don't have a garage) and time (I don't think it's "fun") and tools. Tools are expensive and everytime you do something it seems like you need a new $100 tool!

But you are right, the parts are not that bad (esp if you go for restored/used), it's the hourly costs that kills you when you don't do it your self.

 

I would bet the solution (at least in the near-term) for plug-ins may be itself a "hybrid" battery pack. The current NiMH battery functions well as a short-term reservior, easy to charge and discharge quickly. It functions as a "petty cash" account for energy, storing braking energy, giving some up for quick acceleration bursts. But it is poorly suited for long-distance.

A plug-in hybrid, essentially an EV with a small gas engine for when battery runs out, is a different animal. It needs a high-energy, long discharge battery. It would have to tolerate deep charge and discharge cycles, which take time, especially given the total energy that must be pumped into them to propel a car for hours. There is a huge capacity difference between the present Prius battery and one that could replace your present family car for long trips (6-8 hours vs. 3 minutes).

Don't agree? Think a 75 mile range is all yo need? Ask GM how well their EV-1 experiment worked out. Once you get past a small minority of car owners, you find most occasionally need a long-distance car, and the EV-1 had a commute-only range. Although most of the trips may be short, that would mean you need a second car for the longer drives, a very expensive two-car solution.

Present battery technology doesn't offer both the needed high capacity and easy charge/discharge in one battery. A combination, using the high capacity battery to (also in a tightly controlled manner) to feed alternatively the motors and the "petty cash" battery, might do the trick. The "PC" battery would act as a buffer to allow precise and smooth control of the high capacity deep discharge battery.

Perhaps the gas engine could be made even smaller in such a car, and might charge the high capacity battery if needed on a daylong trip.

It's another layer of batteries and control, but I think this solution is more likely than a "one battery that does it all" solution, at least for several years to come.

 

My car before it died and I had to get rid of it was a 1992 Camry. I bought it used in 1998 with 106K miles on it and when I sold it to the garage she was towed to, it had just over 250K on it. Still a strong engine but it had a lot of problems I didn't know about. I bought it and then a few weeks later decided to run a Carfax report and I found out I was like the 8th owner of it. It was good when it lasted and I am hoping to get maybe not as many miles on my Prius but at least 10 years out of it.

 

Compare the interior of a Prius and a Corolla. Right away it should make sense why one is a little more expensive than the other. Then hop on autotrader and check out the resale value of the Prius vs the Corolla. Which should remove all remaining doubt.

Prius > Corolla.

 

Now the prius is a new car pulled "out of time".. (the future)

 

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Good Point... plug in would be fine as long as people truely plugged them in when they got home or their destination...
This is a good point which shows that uninformed EV button use is not good.. people will drain thier battery down to the minimum and leave it all night knowing they can charge it up when they start it up the next morning as the ICE is warming up... Good thinking, but quite possibly not for the battery's sake.

When we get to LiIon, that may not be so much of an issue "not sure" but for now Toyota is doing alot with the one small battery they use.

'Corolla is far to boring and too simple for me! :lol:
It wouldn't be near the fun to drive for me either.... I have always avoided cars that made me feel like it was driving a glorified roller skate.

NO Insult intended... just my feelings for me....
I wouldn't want a VW bug either... again.. just my preference.

 

That's pretty good for being the 8th owner of a car with that many miles on it! You have no idea how owners #1-7 treated the car while they had it; whether they did regular maintainence and such. And for it to last for over 250K miles to boot, wow that's darned impressive.

 

I just don't get why people compare a Corolla to a Prius. I would no more drive a Corolla than a 1985 Chevy with 300K. The Pruis is COOL. What's the issue? There is NOTHING like a Prius to even compare it to.

 

I bought a Prius because I am middle-age, cannot afford a Mercedes, BMW or Lexus, and can still look good- no excuses or "keeping up with the Jones's" necessary.