Consumer Reports Eats Crow

Being covered here.

 

They should be eating roadkill.

 

The Prius chart still looks bogus to me. In addition to the obvious difference between a Prius and Corolla (can you get nav/bluetooth/sks/leather in a Corolla?) how do the come up with a $323 extra in maintenance & repair? Do the brakes not wear on a Corolla? They don't on a Prius. It's only oil and filters for the Prius.

And what about the 0.1% extra depreciation for the Prius? What are they smoking? No logical justification for that.

Sorry, they still don't know what the hell they are talking about.

 

I agree that viewing the Prius as equivalent to a Corolla LE except for the hybrid parts gripes me as well...I don't think that there is a Toyota non-hybrid equivalent to the Prius, but that's just my opinion.

I subscribe to CR, but have learned to read carefully and take things with a grain of salt. Seeing the same car (same model and year) go from a "highly reliable" rating to "unreliable" in one year in their used car section has made me skeptical about their ratings. And you also need to be careful to understand what criteria they're using in their ratings...they don't always make sense to me.

-Roger

 

While we've certainly flogged this issue to death in multiple threads it's still satisfying to keep laying on the lashes. The most annoying part is the corolla comparison. They could've done both the camry and corolla like vincentric did. Or, as someone else suggested a camrolla.

 

The Matrix seems so obvious to be a closer comparison vehicle to the Prius. CR didn't pick it because it has poorer FE (their words).

So in the grand logic of this idiocy, they pick the car that is less like the Prius, and then ignore what makes them poor comparsion vehicles.

 

They also use the 44mpg (I guess they must). If I get 44mpg, it would have to be in the dead of winter, with below 0, and snow.

They would also not be including any state benefits many have or will have. If NY finally passes their bills, count another $2k in tax savings, plus 10% off my tolls.

They use 15k a year., while I drive 38k a year, so tack on $3400 savings for me.

So for me, it's about $6,000 is savings... & THAT is over the very efficent Corolla.

 

Well, we have just over 2000 miles on our '06 now and are averaging lifetime 40.6MPG. It really depends on where you live and how you drive it. Run the defogger a lot, lose MPG. Take short trips (less than 5 minutes), lose MPG.

Consumer reports deserves lashes for this one, but from what I understand their MPG figures are based on the same real-world extended road test as they apply to other cars, and track more accurately to what people should expect than do the EPA figures.

Yes, they use 15K a year. This is close to the average driven by most car-owning Americans. You have to pick a figure, so why not go with the average?

In response to another comment, I was the guy who mentioned the "camrolla" in another thread. (Don't know if that's original.)

Oh, and a note on defogger: Folks, if your Prius is brand new and you find yourself needing to run the defogger or not, clean the inside of your windshield weekly! The plastics and other materials in the car will emit residue for some time that builds up a film on the windshield, and this film promotes fogging. After a couple of months, it will not be a problem anymore.

I've always been a bit skeptical about Consumer Reports since I was a nerdy kid (now I'm a geeky adult. Evolution.) and they recommended the Coleco Adam as the best deal of all personal computers at the time. Now, the Adam had its charms, but was it really more useful than all the other systems (Apple, Commodore, Atari, Radio Shack) which each had a wealth of software available?

- Bob R.

 

It is pretty clear that Consumer Reports cherry-picked their facts in order to reach their conclusion that hybrids do not save money. I question several of their assumptions:

1. Prius vs. Corolla instead of Camry -- purchase price. Not to beat this one to death, but if the Prius were compared to the Camry instead of the Corolla, the purchase price difference would be about $2000 more in favor of the Prius.

2. Prius vs. Corolla instead of Camry -- mileage. If the Prius were compared with the Camry instead of the Corolla, the fuel cost savings would be even greater. If we use 24mpg for the Camry instead of the 29mpg for the Corolla (vs. the Prius 44mpg), there is an additional savings of $1385 for the Prius.

3. Duration of ownership. In the study, they assumed that the consumer would purchase a new car, drive it 75,000 miles over 5 years, and then sell it. Why did they pick 5 years? It is not very economical to buy a new car every 5 years, and since the focus of the study is cost savings, I question this assumption. I keep my cars at least 10 years, as do many others (there are several threads on PriusChat about this). If you change the assumption to 10 years, then the fuel savings increases by another $3664 vs. the Camry. Actually, it's probably even more if you assume that gas prices continue to go up.

4. There are other assumptions that I question (smaller things). They assume a state sales tax rate of 7.76%. That seems kind of high, unless you live in CA I suppose. Here in Maryland it's 5%. They also assume that the vehicle is financed. But it the vehicle is purchased outright instead of financed, the effective finance cost would be lower and the delta between Prius and Corolla would be smaller (even less if the comparison is with a more expensive Camry). The maintenance and repair costs of the Prius should be lower, not higher than conventional ICE vehical.


If you add up items 1-3 to the $406 savings that CR arrived at, you get $7455. That's right, the Prius saves the owner $7445 over a Camry over a 10 year period (150,000 miles), and that's not counting the smaller items in #4. That's a far cry from the $5000 or so they CR originally claimed the Prius would cost over the Corolla. Now I feel really good about my purchase not just as an environmentally friendly vehicle with state-of-the-art technology, but also as a wise financial choice.

I think it's quite comical that CR made the blatant calculation error and it just so happened that once it was corrected the Prius came out ahead of the Camry by a small amount ($406). I suspect that had they done the math correctly in the first place, they would have seen that the Prius came out ahead and would have had to adjust the choice of statistics in order to push the Prius out of favor. The report is just not written as an objective scientific comparison. The whole study is biased against hybrids. It is probably designed to draw the attention of readers so that they can sell more subscriptions.

 

According to R.L. Polk (ref here):

http://www.theautochannel.com/news/2005/01/18/006003.html

Median age of US vehicles was 8.9 years in 2004 and rising. I think 10 years would be perfectly reasonable, if somebody wanted to redo the "Consumer Reports" calculations.

Compare to different models, project different fuel cost futures, explore a range of maintenance costs, etc. I don't see that anyone has done a satisfactory job of this as yet.

 

Median age of a car does not tell you how long a new car buyer keeps the car before sending it on to it's next life.

A better approximation can be gained from the 17 million new vehicles sold in the US annualy.
So a 5 year ownership period on average sounds about right to me.

 

I traded a 2002 Camry LE for my Prius and came out about the same as your info above. I couldn't sit in the Corolla comfortably but could in the Prius (knees hitting dash on Corolla). I kept my previous 1991 Camry LE 11.5 years 185k miles and it rusted out. I sold my 1989 Honda Civic less then 2 years ago (kept it 15 years). BTW I only traded my Camry because of the cost of gas which I and many other economists expect to rise to the $5 range in the next few years (I'm not an economist just a student of the economy). We need to realize it's not just present gas prices but future so the Prius is like buying insurance that can pay off big in savings. I might add I looked at a 2002 Prius the same time I bought my 2002 Camry ...they were almost the same price. When I went into trade my Camry last September the Prius' trade-in value was approx. $2000 more. People should read john1071a's links and you'll see it is easy to expect our Prius' will hold value and be able to be upgraded eventually to PHEV vehicles with a cost of 1/4 the gas price and up to 60 miles on an electric charge...at 100-140mpg I think the Prius is a great bet!!

joe

 

The most important thing for me is the EPA vehicle type designation:

The Prius is a "midsize"
The Corolla is a "small car"
The Camry is a "midsize"

If they really want to compare "equivalents" the need to use the Camry. It is also numerically closer to the Prius in passenger and cargo space than is the Corolla.

I think there are some out there, friends of Detroit perhaps, who have been stacking the deck a bit in these "hybrid hype" article. To be generous to Consumer Reports, it could just be that they picked up the "Prius vs. Corolla" comparison idea from one of those.

I'm not really a big fan of "equivalent car" comparisons for the Prius anyway (I came from a Subaru wagon, and use the hatchback the same way) ... but if they do it, I think we should push them to be fair.

 

Oh, I did note on my page (link below) that CR calls the Prius a "small car" on page 19, but a "midsize" again on page 23. They are not terribly consistent. It's almost as if they were forcing that Corolla issue a little bit.

http://odograph.com/?p=483