VW Jetta TDI Wagon and Prius v - direct comparison

To complement my previous message. I admit that gas is cheaper than diesel. To that end, I calculated how many miles I would have to drive (on the highway) the 2015 prius v three to recover the extra $2,300 that it would cost me over the 2014 sportwagen.

It turns out that I would have to drive the prius v a total of 131,428 miles to get even, based on a rough calculation taking highway driving into account (where I live, diesel is 70 cents more expensive than the cheapest gas. Thus, the calculation is as follows: $2,300 / 70 cents = 3285 gallons of fuel. Then 3285 gallons * 40 mpg's for the prius v on the highway is 131,428 miles). I know I probably would have sold the prius v before I would have recovered the extra expense based on the cheaper fuel. Indeed, the prius v would have had more than 200,000 miles by the break-even point (75,000 miles + 131,428 miles).

Now, remember that I was comparing the sportwagen with a heavily used prius v. A more fair comparison (i.e. similar year and mileage between the cars) likely would end up making it impractical to try to recover the extra cost of a prius v based on fuel cost.

Note that my calculations are based on highway driving, which is what I plan to do with my sportwagen. The prius v likely makes more sense for city driving, but I have not run the numbers.

 

I am happy to report that the 2014 Jetta Sportwagen TDI gave me 48.4 mpg on a trip from Washington, DC to Shelby, NC. I uploaded a picture of my mpg at the end of the trip with this post. I have yet to figure out how to get into the 50+ mpg range. I think it's possible, but I could not make it happen during the trip. This was my first long trip with fuel efficiency in mind.

 

congrats!

 

Your choice should be good for you.

For the v. The PWR is the only mode I'm driving on and it works well for me. I have seen mpg on a full tank in the 50's even in this mode. Lately with the cold and rain, that is back into the 40's.

When a car is sitting on a dealer lot, the HV battery may be very low and the car will spend much of it's time using any energy it can generate to charge the pack. This would feel sluggish without a nicely charged pack.

The good thing about hybrids are (if you can get your car to last long enough) is that newer batteries are constantly improved upon. Years from now, newer gen batteries may exceed all our expectations.