Can you make your Gen2 last "forever"?

Lots of rubber and plastic parts to degrade. Someday the seats will split, the dash will crack, the door gaskets will let wind and water in, the suspension will make lots of little noises.

The airbags won't be safe at some point.

If you've been driving this through Massachusetts winters it's probably already got enough body corrosion to matter. When a car like that gets hit in a crash it usually just crumbles into orange dust. Whatever previously counted as a safety cage is gone.

If I'm not mistaken they still do safety inspections there. Eventually you won't be able to get a sticker.

 

If you're in Massachusetts talking like this you obviously are new there or something is very wrong It will not be long and you'll be driving your car like Fred Flintstone literally be able to put your feet down on the ground while the cars moving pee on the ground while the car is driving etc I've lived there If you didn't live there your generation 2 could easily outlive you unless you're like 22 or something easily when you finally get out of the cold if you are that young you'll find out It's nothing short of amazing It's like pictures you see on cruise ship ads or travel brochures move down south and you could have your generation too that you find down here and have it and give it to your kid when you're too old to drive practically of course they wouldn't take it but no problem I moved from Western Massachusetts to Durham North Carolina the city of medicine cars down here can last forever with a bunch of RRR at the end easily. The problem is people don't want to keep their cars that long they have the Joneses and the Smiths and all that to keep up with in their fancy HOA neighborhoods they can't be driving around the 23-year-old Prius. So they're plenty to get down here where I am they're just sitting around people get bored with them and they just park them over there off of their pride and joy driveway and put a Kia in there and then the Prius just sits I go buy them they're there for months and months and months

 

it will last as long as you are wiling to pay for repairs. at some point, looking back, you will realize that it would have been more economical to buy something new(er).
that being said, there are some prius with 4-500,000 miles or more. but they are usually owned by very talented diy'ers who don't have to pay expensive shop rates, and know how and when salvage parts can be used to save money.
trying to replace parts that aren't yet causing symptoms would be an exercise in extremely high labor hours and parts costs.
i've never heard of any hybrid shops around ma, except leo and sons in lowell, but any good shop can do non hybrid work.

 

And not to put too fine a point on it but the real problem with the plastic and rubber parts is that all the replacements are about as old as what you have now.

I don't know of any doing that yet, mostly because the buying public still mostly looks at the Prius as "basic transportation."

The kind of shop you are talking about can happen, but it won't unless there is demand. Lots of people are willing to sink $50k into restoring a classic muscle car, for example.

If/when that crowd becomes fascinated by the Prius, you'll see those shops working some real magic to save the Prius.

Absent that kind of popularity and depth of investment, it's not likely to happen.

 

The question is how much is it worth to you? If rust underneath is not an issue proper care can keep it that way. And the rest of the car is just proper care and maintenance. But that can add up to a scary number. We can all give opinions but you really need a good independent shop to go over the car and give you a real assessment of condition. If you need a reason to drink take it to a dealer and ask that. I bet the bill will be close to the cost of a new one, regardless of condition of your car.

 

The Gen 2 is a fine machine, but newer generations are better. You can keep any vehicle running forever; thousands of Model T Fords are still on the road, but it's not considered economical by most people to do so.

 

You can buy a lot of that rubber and plastic in the aftermarket even door sill rubbers and all of that but most of the Prius I find are owned by well reasonably well to do people that have minimum two-car garages and on and on and on those are the people that were buying the Prius when it came out wasn't it like 25,000 or something along those lines while the Corolla was you know 8500 or whatever so I do remember some of my friends jumping on that bandwagon like in 2005 maybe they were coming from the original little coup I'm not sure I can't remember. But they were reasonably costly and people didn't understand them yet and folks are talking about I'm not having to drive trains in my car electric motors and gas one or the other that kind of nonsense was being spewed they didn't understand how the hybrid synergy drive really worked. So there's all kinds of ways to do this I'm also in the southeast our cars get eaten up by the Sun people just park them at the big old parking lot where they work at the tire place and they sit out there and bake I have two cars where the complete paint job is literally picking off the car where it is just sat and parking lots like in Michelin in South Carolina for 8 to 10 hours a day because that's what people do. And I just leave the paint job luckily for some ungodly reason the door sills and rubber seems to be okay I dressed it when I got the two cars one from Florida one from South Carolina but the paint will never be fixed that would be a $5,000 job and both of the cars are heading to 666 as we speak I look for the nice inside That's where I live I want leather seats reasonably clean floors not a bunch of holes in the headliner from people putting stuff in the car stupid and things like that The outside of the car I live in the south everything here is baked I see people with cars that they care about getting paint jobs every 3 years if they're into that sort of thing Not me not at all. Matter of fact I'm getting ready to take my glass bead gun and glass bead one of these cars and make it look like a parkerized finish basically then I got to figure out some way to keep it from rusting and leave it just like that maybe some satin colored urethane over the top of the metal after it's done and cleaned but that would be perfect kind of look like a DeLorean but not stainless something or do nothing and just leave it. I kind of love the look on people's faces when they look at the car from when I pull up like mad Max and The thunderdome and then they look inside and they're shocked there's no ripped seats nothing's torn up everything works not a light on the dash radio plays good with no messed up speakers and I'm like holy Christ I'm like yeah man I'm not fixing to do anything with the outside That's a never-ending battle and at my age building garages for cars is kind of out of the question.

 

Higher, because it is a very manual process, and the people involved need a lot of skills & experience.

New cars are as cheap as they are because they're making thousands of them identically with lots of machine/robot assistance.

 

pull the pack and put it in a barn. It still wouldn't last forever ,put you may get closer to forever than a daily driver. As long as the critters don't get a taste for it's yummie ( to them ) wiring and other assorted features of critter home sweet home they might possibly find.

 

Who has enough OCD to actually do that?

 

If you have ever watched what classic car rebuilders go through to restore a car to ‘new’ condition, you wouldn’t even ask the question.
Building a gen 2 Prius from parts, or any car, would be a shocking price and then labor on top

 

Yeah that's what I'm getting at. I have worked in an auto restoration business. It is not for the faint of heart. You don't do this for basic transportation. I've had customers who were super-dedicated and had the funds, and we worked hard to satisfy them.

But you really have to think this through... are you ready to use (maybe rent) another car for 2-6 months while yours is being rebuilt? are you able to pay for 200-300 hours of labor at upwards of $150 an hour? Remember you don't get easy auto financing for this, it's a cash price.

Resto guys are probably getting even more lately, I will not claim to be current. And that's before you get into developing improved replacements for the brake booster or other Prius-specific trouble areas.

 

Oh I'm not out to discourage anyone from doing what they want to do. Rather I want to help you understand what it is you are asking for, maybe point out some shortcuts and money savers along the way.

Thing is, what I'm picking up from your posts is that this particular Prius isn't that special. You just want a good 2nd generation Prius.

A Prius is little different from a classic VW in this regard: dealing with a rusty body is expensive. Mechanical renewals are much cheaper.

So why not use the same trick VW aficionados have used for decades? Fly to California or Florida and buy a rust-free one, then pay a good mechanical shop do the kinds of things they already do best: replace the engine, replace the battery, renew the brakes & suspension, maybe set you up with a chassis lift too. You would save heaps of money vs. having your current car rebuilt, and you'd be driving it in weeks instead of months.

 

Why do we talk about rust like it's a certainty? If you want to keep a vehicle rust-free, there are options.

 

If you spent time in New England or other areas where the roads are heavily salted all winter long, you wouldn't have to ask this.

 

Most people do not want to move south to save their cars from rusting. LOL