New to Prius and lovin' it!

I saw another post about how someone came to be a Prius owner and it was fun to read! Inspired me to write me own.

For starters, my other ride is EXTREMELY expensive and very inefficient. But I love him to death and he's one of the main reasons I wanted to go Prii.



A little background. I met my husband in 2005 and he has been a Saturn/GM mechanic since 1997. He worked exclusively on Saturns until around 2002 when they started to integrate other GM models as re-badged Saturns. But he has always been a die hard Saturn fan. He turned me on to them and we've owned about 3 dozen. Mostly fixer uppers, but pretty much everyone in our families has been outfitted with a Saturn or two.

His dealership has now changed to Subaru, but still works on the Saturns as they have a large customer base. He's had some experience with the Vue hybrid and let's just say he was not a fan.

I love Saturns and mine have always been good to me. However, the best I've ever done was 25 in the winter and 30 in the summer. Add a small cabin and a small tank and I was beginning to get annoyed by the lack of space as we take our dog everywhere (he has REALLY bad separation anxiety and tears up the house and breaks out of enclosures when left alone). I also was tired of filling up 2 times a week.

I got really interested in Prii about 2 months ago. A friend of mine has an 04 and she stated she routinely gets 40-50 mpg. She bought her Prius with 112k or so and it now has 147k. She's had NO issues and almost no maintenance. She just bought it in early 2011. She drives a TON.

My commute to take the dog to daycare and work and home is just under 15 miles. A trip to the barn to see my boy is 30 miles one way. So while I can't complain about 25-30 in the Saturn, it's nice to be hopeful to get a bit more! Right now I'm averaging around 40 but here in IL we are getting some real winter. Snow, ice and super cold temps. On days that I go to the barn, I'm putting 75+ mph on the car. It's nice to be able to fill up every other week instead of twice a week. I'm curious to see what it'll be like the summer when I go to the barn almost every day. Right now with the cold weather and the snow it's only 2-4 times a week.

It took me about 6 weeks to get my hubby to even consider the Prius. We both started doing a little research and looking around at available stock. Within 150 miles there were a ton. But we live 5 minutes from a Toyota dealership and we decided to go take a look at one. I did the initial test drive. I left feeling...really confused! The car was so foreign, so strange...so spaceship-y!

But hubby was pretty much sold. His confidence convinced me. I made plans with the sales guy to come back two days later. Right as we were getting ready to leave he texted me to wait that he was selling a car. I said "no big deal we can come and look around and wait" and he said "no I'm selling your car."

I was bummed, but we decided to go anyway and look at fully loaded IV or V (can't remember which it was) instead of the III we had test drove. It turns out the sales guy had thought we wanted the IV/V so the III was still there!! The rest is Prius-tory!

And here she is in all her glory! Stellaship!