Why did you choose a Prius Prime over a fully EV vehicle?

Range, pure and simple, there's no electric car that can go as far without stopping. Also, there's almost no charging infrastructure around here, so charging at home is the only option.

 

Range anxiety pure and simple. 99% of my day to day driving is in EV mode and ICE for trips. I don’t use public chargers.

 

I am going to use my prius prime to go to the mountains. Often its 225 miles one way with no place to recharge. In fact most of New England you can not recharge so for now only a hybrid car will work.

 

When the hybrid car cost was $3-4K higher than the same model with just a gas engine, I felt it was not worth the extra money. That would be even more pronounced now that the gas cost is so much lower. But for most hybrid cars, the price premium over the ICE car no longer exists. And for Prius Prime with incentives and rebates, the price was much less than regular hybrid or ICE cars.

Now, with the BEVs that was not the case. I could not find a new BEV in the price range I have paid for my PP. Even if I did find some that come close to the price range, lack of charge station and inconvenience of long refueling time on a road would have made any BEV I purchase to be strictly a short-range daily commuter. So, until BEV becomes more popular and sub-$20K daily drive models become abundant, I will not likely replacing my PP.

As for the service, today's hybrids, especially Toyota hybrids need no more service than regular gas cars. It still needs a few more extra services than BEV, but at least Toyota hybrid has a long track record of proven reliability. I couldn't say that for any BEV at this point, not yet anyway.

 

Also, as far as service goes, I'm not convinced the Prime is at a disadvantage to other cars.

Yes, you have an electric motor and an ICE but they each get used as much as possible in their optimal conditions.

In the end, I think it will mean less wear... The system as a whole should last longer than one with just an ICE or a fully electric car. Time will tell!

 

I bought the Prime to use as a daily driver instead of my SUV that gets 17mpg. I can't afford a Tesla, so the other option was an EV with around 100 miles of range and poor charging infrastructure. I made a histogram of my typical destinations and their round trip distances, and from that I calculated that with the combination of Prius Prime and SUV, I'll use less gas than with an EV and SUV, because I can use the Prime for more long trips than a 100-ish mile range EV. The Prime is also cheaper upfront than any new EV (or was at the time I bought it). One of my goals was to minimize transportation cost (the other was to minimize gas usage), and by my calculations the Prime might be the cheapest new car to drive (making some assumptions about depreciation and other costs). I think it worked out to about $0.28 a mile. An inexpensive used sedan would be around $0.24 a mile, but I am willing to pay an extra 4 cents a mile for the luxury and safety features of a new car. I can't remember the price per mile for an EV, but my SUV costs me more than $0.50 a mile. If those numbers seem high, it's because most of the cost is depreciation.

I use the Prime for even more trips than I expected, and I use EV mode more than I expected, so it's been a win. Apparently I could even sell it for what I paid for it after tax credits, so depreciation has been $0. And the only maintenance I've paid for is tires.

 

Well, with the various incentives, a Prime can be had for less than a Prius. Then the available BEVs and public charging infrastructure just don't work for everyone.

A PHEV compared to a BEV will have a higher maintenance cost because of the engine. That system has a heavier maintenance load than the electric one.

Well, the electric side is getting used no matter the drive mode. It is a hybrid after all. The inverter, battery, and M/G1 are running with the engine. Even when it isn't providing propulsion or braking, M/G2 is spinning on its bearings.

 

Why did you choose a Prius Prime over a fully EV vehicle?
For me it was "Why buy Prime over Hybrid or newer A/T?"
a) was doing 3hrs in bumper to bumber traffic and wanted a car that could go EV and not idle motor for 3 hrs a day.
b)not much interested in lugging around a dirty cord (and I'm a construction worker LOL) and trying to find place to plug in and worry about $400 cord being stolen (I work in SF mostly, where street crime is way of life).
c) didn't want to be tied down to charging regime, need to be able to gas up in hinterland and not look back. Maybe in 10yrs there will be standard QUIK SWAP big batts for EV cars where you pull into gas station stall and put Credit Card in and a robot swaps out your big batt for reasonable fee and you are back at 100% in 2 mins.

 

I was driving a manual transmission Miata as a daily driver. Got stuck in a couple of two-hour backups on the interstate and actually got a charley horse from braking and shifting, so decided to get a newer car that my wife could also drive. Thought about an EV, but couldn't afford a Tesla, didn't like the Leaf and didn't trust GM, but liked what I read about the PP and our experience with Toyota. Test drove one and bought it that day. Found that I really enjoy EV driving, so it has been an enabler for my next car which will either be a Tesla or the RAV4 Prime.

 

I too have a manual 6 speed fun car and got the Prius Prime as a gateway drug to the future which will be all electric. It will also allow me to keep my manual car longer I think. It will be an antique soon.

 

I occasionally need to make a long trip but mostly drive under 25 miles/day. I also am efficiency minded - love getting high mileage whether energy comes from gas or electricity. As I read through the specs, the PP emerged as the clear winner - for now. That said, our next car that we’ll buy (alongside of the Prius Prime) will be all electric.

 

Our Priuses have been so reliable that we will always own at least one Prius. That said, I would buy a Tesla, but I can't even get a price for a drive unit or battery. The only thing to go by are Elon's tweets which mean nothing. The service center has no figure for either.

 

Not a PHEV owner yet, but am looking at them instead of a BEV due to much of our travels being away from the well developed charging networks. While charging of some sort is essentially always available, adequate fast-enough charging is still significantly less so when far away from the Interstate Highway system.

When not traveling, the Prius Prime has enough EV range to cover a large portion of our local driving, the RAV4 Prime would cover nearly all of it.

I currently have some excess solar PV capacity, and since the incentive program expired on June 30th, the excess is now a free gift to the utility. Eventually as the system ages and shading trees grow, there won't be any excess. But until then, a plug-in vehicle would give me some free-fuel miles, though I'd also end up adding more solar capacity to better supply any plug-in.

If I was still commuting to employment, I probably would have gone full-EV for a commuter car about the time I installed the solar system, and would have sized the solar to include that purpose. If the spouse ever replaces her daily driver -- a stick shift '89 Integra -- I'll think about such an EV again. But I'll probably need to pry the shift knob from her cold dead hands. At least the household's newest vehicle, a '14 Forester, is also stick.

 

I love the Prime but we have three manual cars that are awesome (Vette, WRX, Challenger). You can't replace the fun of shifting gears. The Tesla S did nothing for me (the performance).

 

Got the Prime because of available tax credit, longest range of PHEVs, toyota proven reliability and quality control. The other ride is a V8 ISF, needed something 80-90% of the time to soothe the wallet on gas

 

Simple decision for us. An EV won't take us where we often need to go.

But that doesn't rule out one for a daily driver in the future.

 

As said before, range primarily. I can drive in EV around town for errands etc. Once I went to Prescott AZ; about a 400 mile trip one way and got 62.7MPG average. Cost me ~$65 in gas to go ~800 miles round trip .