Prius a remarkably fragile car?

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Crsgardner @ Apr 3 2007, 09:49 AM) [snapback]416990[/snapback]</div>

Welcome to the site. You had snow?! We had ice. Lots of very hard ice. As our roads deteriorate we build cars with less ground clearance. :blink: In our other cars we took hitting things for granted. They sat higher, the plastic was thicker, they were made of steel. As everything gets cheaper and lighter it will take less to cause damage. I'm sure I've got some damage to the front plate and I'm not offroading. On the bright side the Prius is probably more durable and has higher ground clearance than a Corvette or GT40.

Although it may hurt to look at it, my advice is to leave the "little" dings alone. They add character and respect. Fix it when a "major" repair is needed.

The deaf guy crossing the parking lot will hurry out of your way when he sees that cleft.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Crsgardner @ Apr 3 2007, 10:49 AM) [snapback]416990[/snapback]</div>

I would say that unfortunately yes, the Prius is extremely fragile.

My mom was slowly driving out of a parking lot and hit a pothole. It was raining, so it looked like an ordinary pothole. But it was 8" deep. Now, as some have pointed out, the car has 5.6" clearance, so the end result was about $1200 or so in damage. I stayed there and watched car after car drive through the same pothole and just keep going. The Prius left the entire inner fender plastic piece there, and also bent the front fender and some other damage. To be a bit fairer to the Prius, we did find several cars that had been damaged after we investigated, and the insurance company of the parking lot did pay, but still it should not have been so damaged.

 

Find yourself a good plastic welding shop. Take off the scratched/broken parts yourself and have any cracks welded and the part reshaped to its original shape. A bit of paint, bolt it back on and walah, all fixed for minimal cost.
If you feel that you must drive the way you have been and in the type of weather you experience, it might be a good idea to consider a bulldozer. :lol:

 

My first car was a 1966 Plymouth Belvedere wagon. Yes, it was well used, and, no, I'm not that old. One day the neighbour was looking the other way going around the corner and ran into me. Totally creamed the front end of his Rabbit, bent the hood, and broke an engine mount. My front bumper had a little ding I didn't even bother to repair, and I had to straighten the headlight bezel. Compared to that tank, yeah, a Prius, like all the other new cars with bodywork where the 150 pound bumpers used to go, is pretty fragile.

 

Y'all are a little bit mean with your suggestions of driving lessons and Hummers. A car is meant to be driven in a normal way. If this guy is having problems, perhaps we need to get out of "group think" and consider that the car might not be perfect. The car should be able to withstand some degree of human error.

I've only had mine since last Saturday and have babied it. I was very slowly backing it out of what looked like a flat driveway and somehow the front scraped the ground. I was going slowly and I am shocked that it would scrape on an imperceptible dip. I'm afraid to look to see if it did any damage, but I imagine all is well. Or well enough.

If the bumpers were more substantial, they would weigh more and the car wouldn't get the mileage we want.

From what I read here, perhaps the car isn't fragile. A better word might be vulnerable.

And, as far as the better-built VW bumpers, here's all I have to say: My '99 Passat blew a cylinder in December. So I was driving my father's 2002 Jetta TDI (diesel) two weeks ago and the transmission went out. We are scrapping both of them (after buying nearly 30 VWs over the last several decades). They might have great bumpers, but you don't really need great bumpers when the car can't be driven.

 

The 16" wheels will not give you any more ground clearance, unless you put larger tires on them. Stock, the 16" wheels come with lower profile tires to maintain the wheel rotation rate (speedo readout constant).

I don't think there is much you can do to improve on durability. If you're not careful with what what you do it can result in increased stress on more expensive parts. The spring type curb feelers are a good solution to warning you that you are about to hit. They make loud noises when they touch something.

 

The Prius bumper covers are made of thin hard light weight plastic that cracks easily. Other bumpers, such as on my Honda Accord, CRV and Geo Prism are made of a thicker polyethelene that takes a grear beating before it cracks. On the thicker poly bumpers a slow speed accident just abrades the paint, some of which polishes out but with the Prius you have a crack. Fixing involves a new cover and paint. Easily a $1000 job.

But other than that, I think the Prius is just as tough as a lot of cars built these days. Which is not at all.

Be careful with your baby.

~buttster

This is where I t-boned a woman who ran a red. I hit her doing about 15MPH. She was doing about 35. Nobody hurt, but the car has $13K damage.

 

In defense of the OP, he's in basically a suburb of New York City where every driver is a Type A personality on roads that are not well maintained. If you believe a new car there won't get dinged you probably believe in the Tooth Fairy too. The Prius is not "built Ford tough" and it's not built by Timex.

I have a luxury. I can debate whether to take the Intrigue or Prius up north. Does the improved economy and smaller size of the Prius outweigh the ruggedness of the Intrigue? It's not an easy question to answer. If something happens to the Intrigue I will be unhappy. If it happens to the Prius I'll be unhappier.

Based on the photos it is obvious that the Prius and newer cars are designed to show more damage in a collision than to transmit that energy to the occupants. As drivers and owners we are annoyed when that happens at low speeds because there is great damage and low prospects for bodily harm. We'll be happy should the car be demolished at higher speeds and we exit uninjured.

I guess we'll never see a Prius in a demolition derby.

 

Was this snow, or that weird ice we had where everything looked like snow but was actually ice? Theres no way snow did that to your bumper. I have a neighbor who backed out of her driveway and snagged the corner of her bumper on a chunk of that ice and cracked it immediately, she has a new Honda Accord.

The answer is no, the Prius is no more fragile than any other unibody car I've ever had.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(sub3marathonman @ Apr 3 2007, 09:17 PM) [snapback]417351[/snapback]</div>

You can't use a pothole as an indicator of how strong the car is. Potholes are strange, you might have hit it 2 MPH faster and had no damage, so you can't compare individual cars' damage in situations like that.

 

There's no way you hit just snow and did damage like that, I know because I've pushed my prius through snowbanks and snow thats been around a while and had nothing, not even a scratch, and certainly nothing like that. It had to be ice, whether it looked like it or not.

As for your driveway, don't know what to tell you. The Prius is as low as a Mazda Miata, I think if you hit the chin of the bumper on anything this low, especially when you have the back of the car rising as when backing out of a driveway you're going to get torquing of the bumper which will give you a crack.

We've had our Prius 3 years and driven it in all kinds of scenarios including driving on rutted backwoods pathways getting back to cabins etc without ever causing damage to the car. I think your damage is an effect of poor driving.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've ever come in contact with anything when maneuvering a car, as a matter of fact the grand total is two times in my decade+ driving career and I drive nearly 25,000 miles a year. If you run into stuff...its poor driving. The car is not designed to be run into things.

 

Be VERY careful with the roof... which is extremely thin and might be aluminum. Most cars these days have thin-ish metal roofs, but the Prius is VERY thin. It's easy to create a small depression and not have it pop out. I'm not sure this is very unique these days.

 

i drove my prius for 6 years ( 2001 prius ) in NYC and jersey city area, no accidents, it totally depends on the driver. And furthermore it depends on luck

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(SW03ES @ Apr 7 2007, 02:56 AM) [snapback]419249[/snapback]</div>

I believe you can use a pothole as an indicator. The fact is that the Prius hit an 8" pothole (filled with water and unable to see how deep it was) and had about $1200 - $1500 in damage. The fact is that some other cars also hit that same pothole and had some damage, but apparently not that much, at least according to the insurance people who handled the claim. The fact is that I watched car after car hit that same pothole, at varying but slow speeds, and all continued to drive away. The fact is that after my mom's Prius hit that pothole it left the entire plastic inner fender laying on the road, bent the fender, and had some other damage.

So is it unreasonable to have an 8" pothole in the road? I would say yes, and the insurance company that insured the parking lot agreed that it was their responsibility to fix the car. They also fixed the pothole soon after the Prius hit it. But that still doesn't change the fact that many, many other cars, unibodies and cars with frames, hit that same pothole and had no apparent damage. The speeds varied, but it is doubtful to me that a difference of 2 mph could have saved the Prius from any damage.

But in my opinion that does mean that the Prius is more fragile than the "average" car. It has extremely low ground clearance, and apparently no measures in place to compensate for the potential damage that may cause. It doesn't mean that the Prius is a piece of junk, in fact my mom still loves the car. However, when it came time to replace the junky original tires I did pick ones that added a slight additional amount of ground clearance.

 

I have a few thoughts on this:

1. Plastic becomes brittle when it's cold. It will crack when it otherwise would have deformed under load. Had you hit the ground in summer, there would likely be no cracking.

2. It's very likely you never encountered exactly the same situation with your old car. Not the same snowbank. Not the same temperature. Not the same suspension, so the load is different on the plastic parts.

3. Your old car was probably built when there were reasonable bumpers, fenders, and other car parts. Nowadays, much of the low-level stuff is plastic. Nothing dents any more; it either scratches or breaks.

Sub3, your observation of other cars hitting the same pothole isn't scientific. Hitting the hole at slightly different speed and perhaps at a slightly different position, can make all the difference in the world. It isn't necessarily the car's fault until you've eliminated all other factors.

What "...measures in place to compensate for the potential damage..." would you like to see? How about a solid steel beam? The plastic parts would be protected, but you'd be injured in the sudden stop.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(sub3marathonman @ Apr 10 2007, 11:18 AM) [snapback]420792[/snapback]</div>

You didn't read what I said so I'll re-post it:

Unless you had a radar gun and laser position monitoring devices you have no way of knowing whether the other cars hit the pothole at EXACTLY the same angle and EXACTLY the same speed. Like I said before, potholes are funny because one degree difference in angle or a MPH change in speed can effect how the vehicle glides over the pothole.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(SW03ES @ Apr 11 2007, 12:42 PM) [snapback]421501[/snapback]</div>

Yes, I did read what you posted. And yes, it isn't a scientific survey, but I watched dozens of cars hit that pothole while waiting for the police to arrive. And maybe even another Prius might have "glided" over the pothole unscathed if it entered the pothole at a 43 degree angle instead of a 42.8 degree angle. But I doubt it. I didn't see another Prius drive through the pothole though. My guess is that it would have been damaged too.

However, each and every car was going at approximately the same speed, because it was just at a parking lot exit. I'm sure no two cars were going the EXACT same speed, but for me it was close enough. Each and every car sunk deeply into the pothole, and each and every car continued to drive away. Maybe none of them had a plastic inner fender to leave at the scene, but none of them even lost a hubcap. And it would come as no surprise to learn that the SUVs I saw barely even slowed down for it.

So yes, if you want to take things to the extreme, maybe I can only state that this particular Prius hitting this particular pothole on that particular day was more fragile than the "average" car that hit the same pothole.

 

Although I live in Pensacola (relatively good streets), I work in New Orleans and am in the city M-F. I drive a minimum of 20, occasionally up to 40 miles per day on streets that generally resemble the dark side of the moon. Put another way, I beat the living daylights out of my Prius every day just going to and from work. No way to avoid it, the roads in NOLA are just awful. Nothing has fallen off, and to my knowledge, no parts have broken. I have induced several minor rattles, but I have been able to either tolerate them or have them neutralized at the dealership. The bottom of my air dam is well scuffed, and I've bottomed the suspension more times than I care to think about. And the car just keeps coming back for more.

The problem with this thread is that the question is stated in unavoidably subjective terms. How exactly do we define "fragile". How much is "remarkably"? If we apply my "empirical" definition, I'd unequivocally say, "heck no, this car is not at all fragile, quite durable, in fact." Obviously, others feel differently. It will, knock on wood, take a severe turn of events to convince me that this car is "unduly delicate".