Purchase advice - to PIP or not to PIP?

I've been lurking here and enjoying the deep knowledge base. I am planning to buy a Prius for my sixteen year old daughter. Right now I'm debating between a 2012 II or a 2012 PIP. Both cars are the same color (she's picky), and have somewhat similar mileage on them (135-158K). Both are $7,500-$8,000.

The regular Prius has a great Carfax history showing 10K oil changes and service at the dealership. Owned by snowbirds. Serviced in NY and PA during the summer months and FL during the winter.

The PIP does not have service history.

She drives very conservatively and mostly drives to and from school and church activities. This makes the PIP pretty attractive to me because I think she would get a decent amount of EV miles out of it.

I expect a little bias based on where I'm posting but...is the PIP worth the risk for the benefit of possibly less fuel cost? Are there other reasons that I should favor the PIP? Or should I run?

Thanks

 

Thank you for the quick and informative response!

Well since I wrote that post, I went and looked on the Toyota website to see if, by chance, it had been maintained at a dealership and I discovered that it actually has quite good service records but...the car also lived it's first four years in MA which concerns me. I don't think I care to deal with rust issues.

And the other one appears to have been traded in due to a potential failed head gasket. The dealership advised the owners of it but they then show no record of having repaired it. Ugh.

 

Agreed. I'm one of those guys. I pretty much never take my fleet of vehicles anywhere for service but I do keep pretty meticulous records of the work that I perform and keep receipts together also. It never seems to matter though since by the time I sell them, they're never worth too much. Haha.

Both cars appear to have been traded into Toyota dealerships and then sent to the auction. The Toyota website shows most, if not all, of the service records for both cars. That is such a great resource.

 

Both of the cars are at dealers in the Atlanta metro area. I would prefer to buy from an individual but we will see how impatient we get.

Both cars have full service history on Toyota's website.

I've been educating myself on the Prius in general and PIP-specific issues also. Regarding battery replacement, from what I've read so far, nobody really knows the cost because the only known failures were replaced by Toyota under warranty. Do I have that right?

This forum is a really great resource. I'll be spending a bunch of time on here reading. Thank you!

 

Just to close the loop for all of those who were so kind to reply to this thread. We ended up finding a very clean, one owner 2012 Prius (or PIP) with full dealer service records. Lived it’s whole life in S. FL. I still love the idea of the PIP and wish we could’ve found one that satisfied us within our timeframe. My wife seems to really like this car so, who knows, we may have a PIP or a Prime in our future for a real estate car. For now, I will go through this one and figure out how to bulletproof this car with the help of this forum. Thank you all!


iPhone ?

 

I’m from FL but we live in North Alabama now. We had a very hard time finding a car we loved around here so we ended up buying in Atlanta. We got great mileage on the way home yesterday. We got over 51 on the first leg of the trip and then we ended up at 49.5 on the second leg. These readings are from OBD Fusion app so I’m not 100% sure how accurate it is with this car yet until I can do some calculated runs for comparison. It’s almost dead on with our Miata though.

The car really drove great. I’m very pleased with this purchase for Hannah. I feel safe with her driving this and it’s such a nice, clean interior layout.


iPhone ?

 

Sorry about that. I had to put something in there to complete my registration. And I was looking for a PIP originally so that’s what I put. Not sure how to update it on my iPhone. I’ll change it when I get seated behind a computer screen again.


iPhone ?