Many people in this forum bought a Prius to save on gas, and some go to extremes to get the highest possible mpgs that the car can deliver. I wonder, what do you do with the money saved? Is anyone out there conciuosly setting aside the savings for a particular purpose? I'm not.
My old vehicle was a Ford F-150 @ 15 MPG. I have saved 1900 dollars so far on fuel and at least 400 on maintainance. I've had the car for less than 10 months. In ten years, I expect fuel and maintainance to completely pay for the purchase price. If the price of gas goes up the timeline shrinks. Others compare the savings to what you might get from a Corolla or Camry but I would never have thought of buying one of those. My goal was to get 50 MPG. I felt alot of guilt about burning 1760 gallons of fuel per year. I now consume 500 gallons of fuel and less oil and brakes and no tranny fluid etc. I'm not setting it aside per se, but I will sort of use it to buy the next car. There are those that are concerned with the cost of replacing a battery. Hell by then the savings will have paid for the whole car.
Yup. I used my Classic Prius money saved to help buy my HSD Prius. And I'm know of several guys who were first ridiculed by their wife for purchasing a Prius that are now setting aside money to buy a Prius for her.
Yup, I got hammered for ordering the exact Prius I wanted after months of attempting to sell the spouse on the merits of the Prius. I went ahead after months of not being able to sell her on it and went ahead and custom ordered the one I wanted anyway. Got it under three months from the order placement too.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(TonyPSchaefer\";p=\"65598)</div> Three Words: Off-track betting :mrgreen:
I'm a systems analyst and systems integrator. As a consultant, I bill my clients mileage, which in Canada is around 44 cents a km. Even in this nasty cold weather, my direct operating costs are around 8 cents a km. I'm socking away the remainder, as I sure as h*** don't feel like working when I'm a cranky old fart. Guess I'm already cranky though ...
I find it curious that people consider money not spent on a hypothetical but nonexistent situation (in this case gas not spent on a car you don't have) as money "saved." Let's see, what am I going to do with the money I saved by buying a Prius instead of a Lear jet? Maybe I should use it to buy a yacht. On the other hand, saving is always a good plan, and if the mental game of pretending that the absense of a specific expense is a savings helps you to put money in the bank, then more power to you. Back in the days when I first had a little more money than it cost me to live, I put money in the bank every month as savings toward a new car, so that when the time came I could pay cash and avoid paying interest, and I put an additional sum in the bank every month to go toward house repairs. I accounted for those savings separately from my regular savings and did not think of them as my life savings, but rather as special-needs accounts. Now that I am more than comfortable I don't have to do that anymore. My income exceeds my expenses so my savings keep increasing in spite of my effots to find things to spend money on. Admittedly, I'm not good at spending money because there's so little I want. So, no, I don't do anything special with that hypothetical money I "save" on gas by driving a Prius. A quick guesstimate suggests I spent between $300 and $350 on gas my first year in the Prius. Maybe I would have spent $200 more had I kept the Civic. Big deal. (What is a big deal is how much fun this car is to drive, how comfortable it is, how much safer it is due to ABS, Trac, VSC, and air bags, and the cumulative reduction in energy waste and emissions the more people are driving them.)
I use my Prius for work and get paid a fixed expense rate and an allowance for mileage. Since mileage / fuel efficiency figures in both of those numbers I am "beating" the system. I track my expenses and have been putting the money I "earn" into an account for my next vehicle (I have to trade every 4 years). Since mid June I have put 20,000 miles on my Prius and it has served me well! I also am glad to be helping the environment and enjoy all the jokes about plugging it in.... 8)
It's a little curious, but not completely unrealistic. In my case I was planning on replacing my '97 Ford Expedition with a newer model using the older one as a trade in....this was the plan. For whatever reason the concept of a hybrid caught my attention...I can't honestly tell you when or where I even heard about hybrids. Although it is possible I would have eventually considered another sedan they had no appeal to me at all. The Prius offered the whole package...a benefit to the economy, fuel efficiency, and a chance to support a technology I felt was revolutionary and important. It is, thus, easy for me to tell you how much money/fuel I saved. I saved over 1000 gallons of gas over the Expedition I would still be driving like a bat-out-of-hell at 12mpg...at $1.70/gallon I saved $1700 last year.
With the savings over my Saab 9-3 SE convertible I bought a new bicycle and am saving even more money by using that than riding around in the Prius. Unfortunately, it's costing me more money because of all the women I meet while on my bike. It'll even cost me MORE if my wife finds out! Alas, the problems never seem to end. (just kidding about everything except the Saab and now riding my bike more)
