209k miles 2010 prius good deal?

no. welcome to priuschat!

no car with 210k is a 'good deal', unless they give it to you. you are going to spend the remaining life of the car repairing it. what is blue book value?

 

well, if it's a 'brand new toyota battery', that's worth about 3k. you need to see the invoice.

but what about the brakes, engine, tranny, suspension, inverter, coolant pumps, air conditioner compressor, oy, i could go on and on.

 

Is that 150k one for 7800 just hypothetical, or is it another car that you've seen and are considering? It sounds like a better deal.

I say that because the price difference between the two is only $500, whereas extrapolating (a bit wildly) from my recent shopping experience, I'd expect the odometers to make more like a $4k to $5k difference in the price (the cars being otherwise similar year/model/equipment).

But of course you are the one looking at the cars. If the higher-mileage one is super clean as you described and the other has been through a war, that could change the calculus some. (Or if one looked clean but had subtle evidence of really extensive body repairs ... that happened with one of the ones I looked at, and it had a perfectly "clean" carfax too ... caveat emptor.)

If the seller of the 209k one would accept an offer more like $3 or $4k, you might still end up happy with it ... I'd recommend keeping that price difference in the bank from day one as a start on your unexpected-repair fund. You might never touch it, but you'd want to have it.

-Chap

Anybody who does a lot more car trading than I do may say that my numbers are out of line ... I've only hastily extrapolated from a very few cars I looked at, all with a lot fewer miles than those.

 

Woops, I skimmed right over the recent battery replacement when I first read your post. I agree with bisco that would justify about a $3k better price than I was thinking above.

-Chap

 

have you considered a non hybrid? they should be a little cheaper, or to put it another way, you could get a newer lower mile comparable.

 

check out the thread by comatoes, 'need electric a/c compressor and the dealer wants $6,600.

 

@Elrik

Greetings and "Welcome to Prius Chat"!

FWIW, the average lifespan of the "Toyota Prius" according to Toyota is 175K miles

With that said you might consider looking at vehicles with LESS miles on the clock than what you are looking at now. Prius is a well built and dependable machine, but miles are still miles. Looks can be deceiving. For a few thousand more one can easily locate and purchase "Certified Pre Owned" units and usually have a decent unit for the amount invested. Furthermore said CPO units usually come with a warranty. Both of the units you are considering likely will have no warranty.

If you were unfortunate and had to deal with a unforeseen repair you might get off cheap, or you may have to spend a high four digit figure depending on what happened.

Do some research on costs of trans-axle failures, inverter failures, and A/C failures. Those are just a few of the examples of things that might go wrong and would need to be dealt with in order to continue to use the vehicle in question.

To answer your questions, IMO neither of the two vehicles in question are "good" values. The one that has the battery sounds like it might be a good deal. HOWEVER, if it is such a good deal then one has to answer this question. Why is the seller selling this car? After all it was just tuned up, fluids changed, new batteries etc. Sounds like a GREAT deal for the price, but then again in my book red flags are waving in the air.

I wish you the best of luck and have a great day!

 

I would not believe any seller that says the car has a "brand new battery" without a proper Toyota receipt. Many use that term "brand new battery" pretty liberally, meaning it's not the original and it's been replaced.....and you don't know what condition the replacement battery is in.

 

Well said @JC91006

 

Ok, well, a bit of an extreme example that ... the thread in question is about a car whose A/C has been destroyed by someone injecting conductive oil into it.

That is gonna be an expensive repair. The dealer has quoted every part in the system that the contaminated refrigerant could circulate through. (Still, it looks like the dealer has made it about $3k too expensive by quoting replacement of an entire assembly instead of just the three affected parts in it).

Moral: yeah, any time you're buying used, you do want to be as sure as possible that you're not getting a car whose previous owner might have trashed it like that. Inspect carefully. If at all possible, have it scanned for trouble codes, using a scantool that can interrogate all of the computers in a Prius. If you don't have one, even if you have to pay the friendly nearby dealer for a half hour's labor, it's worth it if you avoid buying trouble.

The car with the conductively-oiled A/C was lighting the red triangle ... a code scan presumably would have shown the code for a ground fault. Good example of a situation you'd rather not buy.

-Chap

 

but we do read about older a/c compressors dying to some extent, and if they are at the mercy of a dealer, it's expensive. so is a brake actuator, so is a tranny, so is an inverter, etc.

 

No dispute there ... it's just that there must be umpty examples on PriusChat of an ordinary uncomplicated compressor replacement and what that costs, to one example of what it costs to replace the entire A/C system after ruining it with the wrong oil, and to give an example of typically expected costs, it probably makes sense to use one of the more typical examples.

Now, when buying used, it does make sense to ask yourself: is it possible this seller might have done something that destructive, or have knowledge that something like that was done? Could that be why the seller wants to unload this car? Because in that case, it might make sense to look at the extreme examples of possible repair costs, just to understand how much you have riding on whether the seller is honest or not.

Overall, the way I've come to think about a Prius as a used purchase is this: in general, the greatest risk is right at the time of selection and purchase. The car in general is reliable enough that as long as you find one that isn't being sold because of some known, but not disclosed, wreck, defect, or mistreatment, then it will probably treat you pretty well after purchase (adjusting your expectation of "pretty well" to match the odometer, of course) ... but if you happen to be sold one with major undisclosed issues, that could be nightmarish.

-Chap

 

chap, i agree with you completely. but the one caveat is whether the purchaser is a competent diy'er, or must go to the dealer for every problem. or is there a reasonable local mech with hybrid experience, willing to use salvage parts.