Today's WSJ - Toyota says hybrids don't make sense!

Even if the NYC cabbies drive as you describe, a NYC cab still spends plenty of time sitting and idling, either at a red light or stuck in gridlock, and unlike a conventional cab a Prius cab would not have its ICE running in those situations, and that alone would be a huge environmental benefit for NYC.

 

The inaccuracy here is the sound bite. In the extended statement Watanabe acknowledges that a hybrid costs more. This was never kept secret and Toyota is perfectly aware of it. AND Watanabe has also said that in their work to improve the Prius one of their goals is to bring the cost down. This will require some breakthroughs in technology.

I trust Toyota to solve this problem.

If it were GM they'd either jack up the price or stop making the car.

 

Me, too. I've definitely heard Toyota folks say that they aim to make HSD (or whatever hybrid drive they're using in X years) an option, analagous to automatic transmission on most cars today.

But as you say, I don't think we'll see price decrease that parallel Moore's law. (I'd be hard-pressed to think of any part of a car that has had price decreases over the last 100 years to that degree (accounting for inflation.))

 

Moore's law applies to electronics and every item above that have become cheaper that you cite as being automobile items are electronic.

Except maybe air conditioning.

I think bookrats was referring to the car overall. The brakes, the seats, the engine, the transmission, the tires, the seats, the glass, the metal the rubber. Those items have not seen a decrease in price, except the electronics that might be in them.

 

It's nice to be able to fill up less often than the rest of the car-driving public but I did the numbers beforehand and knew that buying a Prius wouldn't put me ahead of the game, so to speak. It would make a huge difference to someone who was driving a monster SUV but not to me. My Prius is a very green car and that was a big part of it. The homerun, though, is that it has a lot less moving parts than traditional vehicles so I can see it lasting a lot longer and being far less costly in the long run than other cars. Looking solely at gas prices isn't that useful. You may make back the three or four thousand dollar difference just in maintenance costs. A small example is that you only need to change the oil every 5,000 miles as opposed to 3,000 for other cars. My Prius was definitely worth it.

 

and....


.... fuel saving might be a reason in other countries (not USA).

Here, in Europe (Spain) 1 liter of gas costs about 1 Euro (and a couple of cents...) so...

1 Liter = 1.2USD

1 Gallon = 4.5USD

 

That would be the recommended oil change from the manufacturer. I'm sure that I could have gone 5,000 miles on my Corolla but mileage always improved a bit after that 3,000 mile oil change. I try to adhere to the manufacturer's recommendation on oil change interval. From that perspective, I changed it on my previous cars at the recommended 3,000 mile mark. Now I will change it at the recommended 5,000 mark. Whether that's what everyone else does or not is not important to me. What's important is that I now will go 2,000 miles further before the oil change.

 

All these anti hybrid articles are ignoring the basic facts.

1 Cost differences with any car depends on what value people place on what the car offers. For example I don't admit to thousands of dollars premium for the hybrid feature. That is partly because I value the synergy drive instead of a normal automatic. Think of some of the price you pay going for say a 5 or 7 speed automatic transmission instead of a 2 speed on I've had in some cars I've owned, or the typical 3 speed one.

2 I save enough on just brake repairs I expect to cover any hybrid cost difference. That is because my brakes went bad every year and cost thousands on my last vehicle. Regen should help avoid this. So my savings at the gas pump is every bit free bonus to me.

3 I've owned only a few auto transmission cars. Most cars were manual shift. And for most all of them I've had to spend thousands on auto transmission repairs, band adjustments, etc, or else replacement clutches. Prius has none of this no matter how long I keep the car. This easily covers the cost of a new battery pack for me if I ever need one.

4 Prius has no exact non-hybrid match. What looks expensive or cheap to an auto writer depends on what he thinks is a valid comparision. If they compare to a Corrolla or a Camry, I would not pay attention. Those cars wold be among my last choices in cars Prius is actually cheaper than most cars I would have considered if hybrids did not exist.

So forget this fake price premium for hybrids stuff. People buy cars with V8 engines all the time instead of 4 cylinder, and nobody talks about the price premium, and where the savings there?

 

I don't know Evan. I crunched the numbers and compared vehicle data, and I did not find the same thing.

Prius is car size of Camry (actually the interior is slightly bigger), with performance comparable to Camry, yet when I add the Prius standard options to Camry I end up in $28,000 range. So my calculator tells me that my Prius does make perfect sense economically - since the moment I purchased it.

Am I missing something?

 

8 quarts=10,000 miles
4 quarts=5,000 miles
? savings ?

 

Don't forget that BMW's generally require a motor oil meeting the LL-01 specification. That's a very short list indeed.

The little Prius motor running something like Mobil 1 should last forever.

 

Evidently, how you drive is part of the equation. It seems as if you're pretty rough on your brakes and transmission, Tom. I've never spent any money on the transmission of any car I've owned. I seldom have ever spent much money on my brakes, let alone thousands. Yikes.

ps. can I get a bigger copy of that cat holding its paws up, pepa? That's hilarious.

 

I've had tranny costs, both on GM cars. One was an early 80's Buick Apollo, a poor first attempt by GM to build a front drive subcompact. The second was my '94 Regal, which started making howling noises when I back up at just over 100K miles.

Oh, and my Beetle needed a tranny rebuild... after 250K miles.

 

How long do you keep your cars? I don't trade every 3 to 5 years. As far as the Mercedes brakes I wasn't hard on them, and never had excess pad wear. I always have minimized braking. They just seized up regularly from water driving in rain, and they would have to get new calipers every 2 to 3 years at least for the rear ones. And these cost a lot. Also the emergency brake was costly as the cable would stretch if you ever used it and then the car would fail inspection. It was a design flaw they never bothered to fix.

Clutches lasted me 100 thousand miles or so, but not forever.

And the cars with auto transmissions all needed band adjustments to keep the shifting even semi smooth. Riding in other peoples cars with rough shifting I find lots of people can ignore things like this.

 

This is because you are using an apples to oranges comparison. The Prius does not compete with any make or model of SUV - they simply aren't the same class of automobile. Now, compare it to other similarly sized cars, and your payoff will extent beyond the average term of ownership. In my case, the competition was the VW Jetta Wagon TDI. The price on these two cars is very similar, so the comparison boiled down to which car fit better, and had the better reputation. Toyota won on both counts. The TDI back when I bought my Prius, would actually get slightly better fuel mileage in my driving style than the Prius.