I've decided to sell my 2014 Prius Plug-in - I loved the MPG, but my commute has dropped to 0, and may stay that way for a while. We've got more cars than drivers, and I'm switching over to my wife's car, a Subaru Crosstrek. with 8 inches of ground clearance I'll never scrape my bumper on another curb again! thanks to everyone on here for the tips, suggestions, and mind-share over the past 6 years. Oh, on a parting note, I can heartily recommend the Bissell SpotClean Pro carpet cleaner. I ran it across the seats, the carpets under the mats, and in the luggage area. The interior looks like-new now, and gave the car a fresh scent I should have done this before deciding to sell it!
...And I'm back. After much deliberation I've decided to sell my wife's Subaru and keep the Prius. I bought a Bluetooth OBD dongle and ran a battery test, and it came back at 81% of capacity. Brakes are at 6mm/7mm, so I've got some time before I need to get those replaced. I compared the 28mpg I'm getting with the Subaru with 56mpg on the Prius, and couldn't stomach paying for twice as much gas. I'd cleaned the carpets and the upholstery to prep it for selling, now I get to enjoy the fruits of my labor!
Love the gas mileage even with my 2012 Prius v. Every new car I'll get will be a hybrid or there may be a BEV in the future.
Given the trajectory of the car market and provided that you’re not already an oxygenarian, I’d bet serious money on it!
Our personal trajectory, I suspect we may pack in "this game called cars", at most rely on an occasional rental or Modo. Our garage queen is seriously close to mothballed. We did just wrap up a "road trip", a minor up-the-coast jaunt, that added a mere 350~ kms, lol. The morning after returning, we were considering driving for groceries, but ended up walking to Walmart and muling it home. Put the car back on the the CTEK charger.
If I ever live in a city although it is very doubtful that I will ever do that again, but if I do move to a city with adequate public transportation or enough uber/lyft operators, then I will gladly give up car ownership. Doing simple math, if I never owned a car and saved the money instead, I would have been able to retire comfortably by now. On average, the cost of owning and operating two cars comes to be close to $1000/mo. Currently, the closest store is 12 miles from our home. There is no public transportation. And most roads around us are not walkable by pedestrians at least not safe to walk. I have to drive somewhere to take a walk.
Yeah when we bought our house (over 30 years back), we looked at prospects all over the place. Didn't really think about it, but more than once we got cold-feet over really nice places, but off in some god-forsaken subdivision, far from amenities, up crazy-steep hills or similar. We're just a few blocks from a major retail hub now. Sadly there used to be MORE stores nearby: a lot of them have migrated to "retail ghettos" on the outskirts, but there's still nearby mainstays.
Before I retired, I worked for Mettler Toledo. Our U.S. headquarters is in Columbus, Ohio but our corporate headquarters is in Greifensee, Switzerland which is a suburb of Zurich. A fellow engineer was offered a job at our corporate headquarters and accepted. He moved his family to a home in a small community about a 30 minute drive from Greifensee. He tried riding the train to the office and decided that it was a great alternative. It was still a 30 minute trip but he could work on his laptop, make calls or just relax for that 30 minute ride to and from work. He purchased the travel pass and he and his wife started using the trains as their primary transportation. They used their car less and less. One evening a man came to the door and explained that residents of his new community had to become a member of the fire brigade. He had to go to their fire station to register and to receive some training. When he was through with the fire training, someone asked him if he was aware of the community cars. He said that he wasn't. They have a number of community cars that residents can sign out. They have to be refueled before returning them but if you have an occasional need for a vehicle they are available. He realized that there was no need to own a car and he sold his. A program like that would probably be abused in the U.S. but it works over there.
Yeah, a free community car to share... I don't think it will work here. In a city setting, well-managed public transportation can work better than personal auto. But in vast areas of rural US, it will be impossible to develop an adequate public transportation network to cover everyone's needs. My workplace provides bus service for commuters. I thought about using it, but the nearest bus stop was 5 miles away from my home and it operates to the work and from the work one time each, kind like a school bus but it did not come to the door, only at the centralized pick-up place. I still had to drive there. And it was not a free service. It cost more than fuel/electricity cost on my own car. So I abandoned that idea. Now, I am working mostly from home, I don't really have set working hours when I do need/want to go to my office. Personal auto is the only solution for this type of commuting.
How funny -- after trying to sell my Prius back in 2020, I decided to sell our Subaru Crosstrek instead and keep the Prius. I just found this thread while searching for another. My Prius unfortunately met its untimely end in stop-and-go traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway. I've been rear-eneded twice, it was finally my time to return the favor. My insurance company totalled it, for what seemed like a pretty good price. I may roll the money into a 2023, if I can find one for a decent price. I bought it new in 2014 just before the current batch of California carpool stickers ran out. Saved many, many hours in rush hour traffic in Silicon Valley, got front-row parking at my company's charging stations, later worked at a company that sold solar/battery systems and got free charging. I'd put 180,000 miles on it, with basic service, and hadn't had to replace the brake pads yet! It went happily into the Sierra Nevada mountains several times - once in a winter storm that turned it into a snowplow. numerous other trips to Los Angeles, San Diego, along the coast and into wine country, and the lowest MPG I ever got was 39MPG doing 75mph with 4 passengers and a cargo box. I have another joystick shift knob, charger cable and unused OEM floor mats to get rid of that I should post here.
