Gave up the PriusV

Hello All

We are in the process of selling our home in Columbus, Ohio. We purchased a home in Punta Gorda Florida in June. We rented a 26' moving van to get most of our stuff down there. We also rented a towing dolly to get the Prius down there. I won't do that again. It was a pretty nerve wracking trip, especially trying to get through Atlanta. That truck has a really poor turning radius and backing up that truck with a car on a towing dolly was near impossible.

We decided to move because my daughter's family lives in Cape Coral and we wanted to be closer to them and the grandkids.

Our daughter had a 2007 Honda Element that is pretty high miles, 170k. She said that if Honda still sold them she wouldn't hesitate to buy another one. I suggested that she drive our 15 PriusV and see if she liked it. She did. She said the visibility wasn't quite as good and acceleration was more sluggish than the Element but the mileage was great and she liked the touchscreen and the gadgetry. Long story short, we traded cars with her.

The Element is mechanically sound and will be our daily driver for now. While we were down there closing on the house we didn't drive any distance and our only regular trip was about 3 miles round-trip to the grocery. Our other car is an Odyssey with a trailer hitch. We plan to keep it in case we need to haul or tow something.

Once we are down there full time I may clean up the Element and sell it because we could just rely on the Odyssey. We drive so little that mileage isn't a factor and getting down to one car would not be a problem.

Another option would be to purchase an EV for our daily driver. There are some pretty good discounts on some of them right now. The cheapest Leaf is $19.9k after the federal tax credit for the 40kw battery version with 150 mile range. That might just suit our purposes. Florida Power electric rates are not as good as the AEP rates in Ohio but they aren't bad and they do have net metering for solar panels.

if you don't mind, I will be lurking on this website from time to time.

Wishing everyone a safe end to this covid pestilence.

Ron

 

We are pretty familiar with Florida as we have spent the past 5 winters prior to 2020 at our daughter's home. Due to covid, we lost the spare bedroom at our daughters as it had become her home office.

We were stuck in Ohio. I had to run the snowblower nearly every other day in February. One day I slipped on some ice under the snow and found myself laying flat on my back wondering if I broke anything. Near the end of February, the snowblower was ice encrusted from the frequent use and the fact that we don't have a heated garage to thaw it after each use. I came out, pressed the start button and the electric starter spun but didn't engage the engine. I resorted to the rope start which on a cold 8 hp engine was a great way to reinjure my shoulder. Of course the engine didn't start on the first pull and the rope didn't recoil back in. I was done. Somebody was trying to tell me something. it convinced me that my snowblower wasn't designed for constant use in a cold climate and more importantly I didn't want to do that winter routine anymore. My wife had been ready to move closer to our daughter and grandkids for some time and now I was onboard.

We closed on the Florida house in July and then before we returned to Ohio to sell our home we got 4 estimates for impact windows. We selected a vendor which started the clock on a 3 month wait for the new windows to be installed. Probably too late for this hurricane season.

You may be right that a plug-in hybrid or even a Sienna hybrid may be our best bet given our routines.