We're number 2, long haul ownership

I think it notable that all the vehicles on the list tend towards being utilitarian.
Which would suggest to me that people "keep" vehicles they use in daily life. To haul, pick up kids, etc....Real World.
Notable that none of the top prospects are "Sports Cars" or Luxury Vehicles.

 

I'm hoping to drive the Prius until the wheels fall off. And then I hope to fly it around without the need for roads...

 

The article used the term 'family' as the description for most of the cars on the list. They are utilitarian, but the owners may also have expenditures that prevent replacing the car more often.

In the case of luxury vehicles, the owner likely could afford to get a new car sooner, or they are leasing. Plus there may be an element of concern for social status and appearance.

Just looking at how long the first owner keeps the car isn't any judgement of how reliable the model is.

Besides, everybody knows you need to keep a Prius for at least 10 years to pay off the hybrid premium.

 

exactly. it actually shows how happy the owner is with the vehicle.

we already know it's the most reliable.

 

I don't know about that.
Most people won't keep a vehicle they feel is "prematurely" breaking down. To commit to a vehicle 10 years or more usually IS accompanied with the perception that it has been and will continue to be reliable.

How reliable is the actual vehicle?

Well I also don't think it's coincidence that all those top models are Toyota and Honda.

 

Make it 11 years for me. I've paid leather trim premium. It has to pay off!!

 

This reminds me of Hewlett Packard and their RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) calculators. They used to be very durable, all the engineers and draftsmen swore by them, they lasted forever. I'd had one for years, decided it was time for a new one: bought the lastest, gave my old one to my daughter (it was promptly stolen from her school locker).

Then one of the buttons on my new one started getting unresponsive, then another. The thing turned into a paper weight in a matter of months. So I gave up, got myself a piece of [email protected] Texas Instruments Scientific; it worked fine, miss the RPN, and definitely not in the same league for feel, but hey.

Then someone at work had a surplus-to-requirements HP RPN, one of the latest, so I bought it off him. It worked for a month or two, then I pushed a button and it started flashing at me. Tried everything, resets, pin in the back, battery removal. Nope. Then it miraculously "healed" itself, for a while. Then went off the tracks again.

It's rattling around here, somewhere, piece of cr#p mark II. I've read that HP intentionally builds them to fail now, they got tired of customers buying one calculator, keeping it for donkey's ages. Between that calculator and the [email protected] (high end) HP printer I recently recycled in disgust, I wouldn't buy another HP product, ever.

I guess the point of my ramblings: it's not unusual for companies to do a 180.

 

Implications for PriusChat longevity if 25% of owners keep over 10-yrs. Note that it is only 2001-2005 owners who could have kept over 10-yrs, so those are the early adopters, a relatively small subset as most Prii were sold after 2005.

I thought the UMich stats say the average US car is 11-years old, but I guess that does not mean they are held by the same owner for 11-years.

 

Fleets sell off. The prius is doomed. Lots of fleets bought them, including the texas state and austin city government, those will be sold with less than 10 years on them This didn't start happening until 2006.

 

Who would have thought it? People tend to keep cars that are useful, adaptable, and reliable!.
The next thing you know they will be considering these issues when buying vehicles in the first place.
I see that none of the top 5 are 2 or 4 door sedans. All have rear doors and are made by Toyota or Honda.

 

Is HP actually building them anymore? I thought that ceased long ago. Shouldn't it be all outsourced by now, with an HP label slapped on some third party product?

For a very long time, H-P calculators came from the Corvallis Oregon facility. At some point, the design work was off-shored to Australia. At some point before I left the company family (a spinoff by then) in the wreckage of the dot-com / telecom bust, even that OZ design group withered to something like 8 people. And then I believe even that group was shut down with the design work being transferred to mainland China.

The only thing original about HP these days are the initials. Even the 'ewlett' and 'ackard' were dropped during Carly's reign, it is now just 'HP Inc.' (HPQ) And even half of that computer side business spun off a few weeks ago as Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE), finally retrieving the 'ewlett' and 'ackard' from a decade in a dust bin to put back up on some building. At least it wasn't resold to someone else, as happened to the 'AT&T' label.

The original core of Hewlett-Packard was spun off as Agilent (A) at the tail end of the 20th Century. And even that has since split (KEYS and defunct VRGY). I still have a few shares dating back to the original HP, kept more for sentimentality and speculation than investment. The cost basis spreadsheet after all these spinoffs, still tracked on a per-share basis, is hideous.

PS. I still use a pair of HP15C calculators, circa 1982-83 (school and work), for my daily computation work.

 

I read something in the news a few years back, that HP intended to discontinue pursuit of the individual, consumer market, concentrate on corporate customers. And yeah, I assumed part of the decline was due to going from an in-house company to a nameplate outsourcing here and there. Sad, and interesting to hear you worked for them.

Here's my idea of RPN these days:


(PCalc Lite app. Turn the phone to landscape orientation and you get the scientific functions, trig, etcetera.)

Apologies for getting so off-topic.

 

That's the obvious-observation.

But I do think that's a huge "psychological" aspect.

My opinion.
But I think automobiles are a unique product. Because they DO take us to events, places, in our lives, they become such big part of our lives. We associate them with Good Times and Bad, driving to vacations, driving to hospitals. In other words, we do "Bond" with these machines.

People name them, feel regret, loss and remorse when trading them in or selling them. We keep pictures of them to show people what we "use" to own.

Is it arguable to assume or speculate that vehicles we use in a more utilitarian manner become a "bigger" part of our lives, simply as a result of their usefulness? And with that bond those vehicles become the ones we might keep longer than say just a Sports Car or Luxury Vehicle? I think so.

 

Honda and Toyota...no surprise there.

 

agreed - our hybrid lexus SUV was manufactured over 10 years ago.
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The RX Body style changed, and so it no longer carries so much of the 'look' of success. So even with low miles, sadly, wer're looking to unload it.
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