Prius Prime vs Rav4 Hybrid

Are you planning on going to a commuter school? Otherwise, it may be better to go with no car in college. I had one in college, but my two most common forms of transport in college were 1) my legs or 2) a bike.

You can save quite a bit of money when you don't have loan payments, car insurance, gas, etc.

 

i would drive them both, thinking about what stuff i need to carry. when we took our kids back and forth to school, i had to rent a mini van.

 

Also about convenience, e.g., not having to hold your foot on the brake when DRCC brings the car to a stop.

 

We sent our daughter off to school 850 miles away with our old minivan. When it died, she shifted to a Honda Civic. At the end of her time at college, her stuff went into an LTL truck (tandem trailers by one of the freight lines). They divide the truck with dividers, and you pay for how much space in the truck you use. The truck parks at the school, you load, then the truck stops at a destination facility and you go fetch your stuff. That's pretty cheap (it was a few $ hundred), cheaper than maintaining the minivan and putting fuel in it.

 

for cross country trips with one or two people, the prime should be fine.

my son has the rav4h, it isn't that roomy

 

Good point, but my foot isn't doing anything at the time other than pressing on one pedal or another, so it's not a big inconvenience to me.

My biggest problem with the Prime driver aids - they are poorly implemented. They over-react in many cases - the most frustrating is the DRCC sudden closing of the throttle when on a gentle bend, when the radar/camera see a slow car in the lane on the outside of the curve. I have tried over and over to like DRCC, but each time is reacts improperly I just turn it off again. The single instance where I found it to be helpful was on a multi-mile stretch of road construction, where 2 lanes narrowed to 1. The truck ahead would slow/speed as the terrain changed, so DRCC worked nicely keeping me a set distance back. Since it was one lane, there was no adjacent traffic and I couldn't pass anyway.

Likely personal preference, but I've been driving long enough that my eyes and feet work well together driving my car very smoothly with no upsets or sudden actions. When the driver aids can do that for me, perhaps I'll like them.

 

If you move your body around, say to locate something in the back seat area, it’s easy for you foot to slack off the pedal just a little, without noticing it. Also, constantly having to exert pressure on something is ... again, “inconvenient.”

 

He lives in Idaho. Makes sense there. Here, there is a Dealer on every street.

 

I suppose it's a matter of preference. I haven't had a problem with the car moving because I was doing something else and let my foot off the brake pedal. I'm in the habit of keeping my foot on it when the car is stopped.

 

Late coming to this thread, but I had PRIME and was thinking to get RAV4 Hybrid for our second car, though ended up getting used Pathfinder Hybrid instead. For me, they are two cars with totally different use cases. If only one car, RAV4 would be more utilitarian I would think. That said, I can't believe a high schooler is going to want either of them nor afford them. Plus I doubt either will last 35 years.

 

I agree though that some of them are done better than others. I especially think the blind-spot monitor lights on the rear-view mirrors need to be about 3x brighter, and they should also have a beeper if you signal or steer into a hazard.

But they improve over time (thus I think best not plan on 35 years, personally). Tesla does them all better, for the most part.

 

But... your profile says you are Male, 58,... Are you planning to drive till 93??? lol

 

15 is close enough to 58 to meet government standards...

 

Since you say you’ll have a house the Rav4 Hybrid with a trailer hitch will be your best bet. That way you can haul stuff in case you need to make repairs and/or expansion on said house. The Rav4 Hybrid gets 41mpg so it would tough to make that up in the Prime unless you run on all cheap EV. Being up north the Rav4 Hybrid has more ground clearance for snow as well as AWD-i as @“Tideland Prius” mentioned.

The best thing I can say about the Prime is if you go into a city that in the future severly penalizes or outright bans ICE only you have a backup plan. That said the Prime has a backup plan built in for any issue you might have which is why you probably have an interest in it. As for batteries the future looks like more rebuilds than outright replacements.


iPad ? Pro

 

That sounds like me, but I’m not the OP...

That being said though, I hope to keep our 2017 Prime for 15 to 20 years. In the meantime though, when our 2009 Prius (135,000 miles now — teaching my wife to drive on it now) starts to fizzle in 5ish years or so, we’ll definitely get a car with ADAS functionality top notch for its time.

 

does toyota sell prime in idaho?