I just got mine. Already have 49 miles at 48mpg so far.

I've been waiting since April 23rd. I wanted any color except white and I wanted package 9.

I was supposed to pick it up Friday but they messed up the registration. I got it at 5PM this afternoon. (August 30th) (Lincoln, RI)

My daughter bought one in February and envy drove me to get one. My entire life I've pretty much stuck to buying younger "luxury" version Toyotas (like with 80,000 miles on them) and then when they reach about 250,000 miles I buy a newer one. It never made sense to me to buy anything brand new. I felt the desire to get a brand new car was simply due to clever marketing from the auto industry.

My first brand new car was a 2003 Subaru Impreza RS. My wife talked me into it because I do a lot of driving and she didn't like the idea to get too far over 100,000 with any car. Plus she liked the 4 wheel drive.

So I really found it hard to justify trading in a great little car that was as far as I'm concerned still brand new for another car. But my daughter ended up loaning me her car and I just found it so great to drive. Plus, getting near zero emissions and great MPG made me feel it was my patriotic duty towards our dying boys in Iraq to do something like this.

So I went and bit the bullet and bought this car.

I'm gonna lose about $9000 on the Subaru though but I figure it's worth it to get this great car.

The way I figure it, the more these kinds of cars sell, the more money will be spent on making them better, the smaller the batteries will get, the better regen braking will get and the more we can get the USA out of the stranglehold of oil.

And if my Government can't see the logic of this then I'll have to simply start with myself. (Oops. I forgot. it's not my government, it belongs to the corporations.)

So thank you Cristin for helping me put my money where my mouth is.

Oh, and thanks also to Priuschat. I've found out tons about this car from you all.

 

Thanks for looking that up. The car is in excellent condition. I also did that lookup and found that same data. I then went and put it in the paper for 15,900 and got zero phone calls.

It was also on autos.com and autotrader.com and I got zero emails.

Then I lowered the price to 14,900 in those 3 places and got zero calls and one email that disapeared.

It was in the paper for a full week both times.

The dealer back when I ordered the Prius in April did not want to give me a trade in price until I went to pick it up. And when I went to pick it up, the new dealer did not want to take a trade in at all.

My Impreza with some of the extras ended up at almost 21,000 before taxes.

So if I end up getting 14,000 for it now, I've lost 7 grand. Now figured out over the 20 months I had the car, this is not too different from what people who do every 3 year trades get hit with all the time. But I'm not used to this kind of hit. As I said in another post, I'm used to buying 3 year old "luxury" Toyotas with about 80,000 miles (which I consider low milage for a Toy) and then selling them for a few hundred when I reach 250,000 miles. So my monthly costs for car travel have always been WAY lower than $350 per month for the car.

This has been my pattern for a long time and it's the only one that really makes sense to me. I bought this Impreza when I detoured from my usual pattern. It was certainly a nice car and the traction control and 4wd made my wife more secure so there is some value in that I guess.

Buying this Prius is also out of character for me, but I feel I owe it to my country to go down this route. Plus I get a great car to boot.

I intend to keep this Prius until it reaches 250,000, though I suspect that 250K might actually still be "low" milage for this car as it seems pretty obvious to me that it's been "over-engineered".


Although it is my intent to keep this car for 15 years or so, it is also quite possible that I'll be buying a 2009 Prius that gets 88MPG, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.