ABC news report on Hybrids tonight

I appreciate your honesty in your post. I don't think anyone opposes to you posting and owning one is not a prerequisite, otherwise how could you learn as to what you want?
And owning one doesn't count anyway if your a dealer with the intent to sell it.. that implies you don't believe in it enough to keep as your own... but that a different issue and irrelevant.

I think what "offended" me as you put it, was your impression to be a camillion to match whatever environment you found yourself in. When you got boxed in a corner, you went from calling the prius a piece of sh it to becoming a dealer?

If can respect your position as

as long as you don't act like your both as to decieve people, and you can stand the heat you will get for such a position.

No one minds you having a different viewpoint and or belief, just don't act like your on the same page when challenged, and then go somewhere else to a new crowd who doesn't know you yet and act like a buick salesman again!

GM and chevrolet have had their place... if you now believe in them over toyota, you will be surely challenged for that stance.... and that makes for good conversation....

I know its a challenge for a car dealer! :lol: But just try be honest and try not to flake back and forth or your words will have no credibility no matter what stand you take? Plus it insults our intelligence and offends our friendship with you for not being honest.

Sometimes the only solution is to agree to disagree.... if your honest, thats ok.

 

What are you trying to find kettledrum?
The 2005's are easy to get now..... and there is a forum for used cars on the forum here.

 

The general public can be very fickle. Two years ago a Hummer H2 in yellow was the hottest vehicle on the planet. It has been posted on here countless times on PC as to how hot the H2 is today.
Other than pickups, Toyota is smoking hot right now, but I have been at this long enough to know that peaks and valleys don't last forever. I remember my father in the '70's getting hot under the collar and complaining about the federal government discussing whether or not GM should be broken into pieces ala AT&T. Sounds pretty silly today.
Rick Wagoner's piece in the Wall Street journal last week was the shot across Toyota's bow, GM is more focused today on winning than they have been in my 15 year 'professional' career. The obstacles are huge, but GM is still the worlds biggest carmaker and have some extremely valuable assets at their disposal. It will be interesting to say the least. I predict that Toyota and other Japanese makers will get very defensive over the coming months and will not give up ground willingly. 75 percent of Toyota's worldwide profit comes out of business in the US. It will be interesting! :mellow:

 

Well, your right about the public being fickle and I know the prius won't be this hot forever in the sense of what people will put up with to buy one because production is increasing big time as batteries become available.

As more cars get out on the road, more people will discover the prius.
Even though we talk about it alot here, it is still a fairly well kept secret with the common person.

Since there is very very little advertizing, there is a mass out there that has yet to find out about the virtues of the prius.

The increased numbers of new prius's on the road would normally force prices down, but that will be offset by an even bigger demand with the new discovery.

This is like the beginning of the Gold rush!... if you as dealer don't get in at the beginning, you are the only one that will be sorry!

The prius is not for everybody like you said, but its technology will get integrated into other vehicles making them just as debatable as the prius.
New technology is always debatable... a good businessman has an eye for a new rothchild verses a looser. If you can't see the signs by now, I fear you never will!

When Google first came out many baulked at another ".com" and was afraid and baulked even more as the price went up over 100.00 a share.... now at over 400.00 a share, they are crying in their beer!

If you want to be like Hank Williams junior and carry the ol "Family Tradition" to your grave, that your own buisness!

Alot of people get onto the wrong track early in life in this world in business, religion, and education... but without a catastrophe to force them out, they never find the strength to let it all go.. the kingdom they have built and nurtured, they hold to thier grave when all along they could live somewhere better, or work somewhere better, or be happier for something better.
Bad love is better than no love at all!.... thats why people cling to loosers!

As a result, they become dinosaurs and die and lonely painful death.

And I disagree about GM being the biggest carmaker.... that don't count if your not the biggest car seller!.....

Look at the old antivirus companies, the old space technology, old aircraft etc etc.... the biggest companies are often the most archaeic and outdated and no one wants their product anymore.
So in your viewpoint, you say they

, all those assests are really a liablity!!!
But I see it just the opposite!... They are the companies that will loose millions upon millions if they trash thier old technology and assests to go with newer technology, so they try to use them anyway and therefore work slower, less efficient and more costly than the newer more agile companies.

Some day Toyota could have the same deliema when newer technology replaces the present..... Hopefully Toyota won't go to sleep in thier money pile and will keep reinvesting into their company and will stay cutting edge!
If they don't, they too will loose out.

As many have taken the name of toyota personally and assumed it as as part of their own identity, you too have appeared to assume the identity of a company name.. except its a loosing team!

You have the right to stay and root for them if you like.... you and your familiy will have to live with the decisions that you make.
It would be nice if everybody wins and GM pulls it together, but I have little faith in them at this point.

 

thats exactly my tought. I got 48mpg with Prius in summer (just got it), now it is down to 38 MPG. I drive mostly 5-10 min short trips with 5 traffic lights between me and work. When I get back to work, I have two mile stretch to first traffic light and that gets me up to 47 mpg over the same route.

Am I unhappy? No, our Avensis diesel probably gets around 32mpg at best in winter and it is pretty loud, 35 in summer, on my average drives.

What really ticks me off is that people go on highway, record 35-40mpg in their car over 2 mile stretch, and then advertise that as their mpg. If that was how real life worked, then I would be getting 60mpg in prius .

 

this is exactly what I meant. So you got 30 mpg on highway trip? SO WHAT? Does that mean that in your usual driving you get 30 mpg average per tank? Or 25, or 20? Doing 60-90 mph trips is best for mpg of any car, but sadly, thats not how we drive.

If you had Prius on that same trip, you could have gotten 50-55mpg easily.

Its comparing completly opposite things - hey, I did this one long highway trip that got me 30mpg in my car, and lets compare this trip with some old lady that got 35mpg in her Prius (probably driving short commutes ), so my Buick gets better mpg than prius!

Buick does have some special EPA test, it is exactly the same test, thats why it is an lab test. And GM engines are not really known for their fuel efficiency, even the new and much improved V6 gets slightly worse mpg than larger Avalon...

 

tough chance of Toyota losing ground. So many new models coming, lack of capacity will be determening factor that Toyota wont take GM's crown as early as 2007.

Toyota is simply taking no chances, and all of the major new models we are getting this year so far have been pretty darn awesome.

 

While I'm no GM fan (family has owned 3, all were junk), I don't see how you can disagree.

They ARE the world's largest automaker in terms of sales worldwide and they also sell the most vehicles in the US. The big problems are that they have a lot of debt, they're forced to sell their cars thru large incentives (hurting profits) and are burdened by other liabilities high labor costs due to things like as UAW contracts, pensions, healthcare costs for current and retired employees and being forced to idle factories too much because they don't have enough flexible factories. GM has a huge disparity in terms of their plant utilization from worst to best due to this. When a worker is idle [thanks to the UAW], the workers still get 95% of their pay.

They Delphi bankruptcy and disputes have also raised anxieties.

In a report earlier this year, GM lost an average of $2311 per vehicle it produced in North America. Nissan was the leader w/$1603 in profit per vehicle.

See http://www.detnews.com/2005/specialreport/...3/A01-87977.htm
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article...5/1002/BUSINESS
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article.../512020410/1014
http://www.detnews.com/2005/autosinsider/0.../A01-202894.htm

 

I venture to say if toyota would have been available 40 years ago.. GM would have never happened... quality was reeeeaaally crappy back then.

 

Are you talking about in the US or Japan? In either case, Toyota has been selling cars in the US for more than 40 years. See http://www.toyota.co.jp/en/about_toyota/history/1950.html
"1957 Oct Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc. (TMS) begins operations in U.S."

http://www.toyota.com/about/news/manufactu...illionthad.html
"Toyota first began conducting business in North America in 1957"

http://www.toyoland.com/history.html says "Toyota started selling cars in the United States in 1958, importing the Land Cruiser and Toyopet. "

From http://www.toyota.co.jp/en/about_toyota/history/1867.html, it looks like they started building cars/trucks around 1935 and 1936.

This is WAY before my time [wasn't born yet], but I hear that the first Japanese cars that came to the US were junk and that nobody wanted them.

BTW, back to big incentives, see http://www.cars.com/go/advice/Story.jsp?se...bject=incentTen and http://www.cars.com/go/advice/incentives/incentivesAll.jsp to see what I mean.

 

I didn't see this report, but a search on ABC News website has a report that essentially criticizes the EPA rating. It starts off with a report that a Jeep Liberty Diesel rated at 22 mpg in the city actually only got 11 mpg. So it's basic theme is that in general expect to get an average EPA as bad as 50% of what the EPA sticker says.

The Ford Escape Hybrid achieved an actual of 26 mpg, when the EPA stickers rates it between 31 to 36 mpg. The Honda Civic Hybrid came up 46% short of its EPA rating. The Toyota Prius achieved an average of 44 mpg in real life driving.

The basic conclusion of this report was that Hybrids like the Toyota Prius do really save you gas, it's just you have to prepare yourself for less than the EPA sticker. It then goes on about the fact that it will take many years of driving to recoup the gas savings, but it does also mention that there is a undisputable environmental argument because a car like the Prius has very low emissions.

The article shows the picture of the Prius. You have to understand that the Prius is going to be the favorite criticism target because it is more than any other car associated with fuel efficiency and environmentalism. It's the car Hollywood celebreties made popular.

It then describes techniques to improve your mileage like turning off you gas engine while waiting at a traffic light.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Autos/story?id=1274541

 

No, here is the US.. I just remember back when I had to purchase my first car in 1975, foreign cars were very expensive and inconvient to maintain because of inability to get parts... GM, Ford etc owned the market... but believe me... if you bought a car back them, it was common knowledge to expect 6 months of various bugs to work themselves out before you could expect the car would run troublefree.

Even after that, you could still expect various things to go wrong at least every year or so... and if you made it to 100,000 miles.. you were doing great!... more than that would surely require a good mechanic and continual maintenence.

We all just took it as a fact of life.. there was nothing better to choose from unless you had unlimited funds to import and maintain it.

Finally we started getting more and more imports but there was much resistance. It was almost like drug lords getting mad that someone was entering their turf.
The imports almost always were more reliable then the domestic with a few exceptions.
The imports starting stealing the market as people realized the reliability between the two was none to compare.

I'm going all my memory on all this.. so if anyone has the facts.. feel free to post...
anyway.. then there was a crisis somewhere in the 70's I believe and we had to retool and start making automobiles "better" to compete. We did start doing a much better job, but the price also skyrocketed to compensate. People seemed to be willing to pay just to get the better rigs.... but still the imports continued to outclass, in effeciency and reliablity and intelligent options.
So the battle continued with our with adverizing Psych games as we hyped our commercials to promote the American team spirit and so we attempted to support our US companies and put our money back into our own economy like good little citizens.

Now today... especially with the introduction of the internet, it has become a world market and not only do we still find ourselves buying better rigs in the form of imports, but our domestic companies have moved overseas to asssemble and make their products for cheaper "They" are not out for the team spirit..only a profit!
then they turn around and ship them back over here and stamp a label on them implying "made in america" and the story goes on.

Our very own companies ie:Ford, GM make better cars overseas, cause they know they have to in order to compete over there... but here at home!.. they still think americans are suckers and will buy crap and pay big bucks to boot!....

Until we speak against them with our pocket books "which has already been happening" they will continue to play us for the easy suckers.

thank goodness now with the internet and wonderful forums such as priuschat.com, we can avoid being played for the sucker.
Knowledge is power and they don't want you to have it!

The more we don't know, the more they can play us as fools... the dealers still do it every day!

Toyota just has a higher spirit of excellence in making thier product... people are willing to pay for it. We are still promoting "image" and paying massive advertising fees to keep the momentum rolling, with the ad fees rolling back into the price and we get less product for our buck due to the massive bombardment of advertising fees.

A good product speaks for itself. How many ads do you "ever" see for the prius?

In my part of the country "NW" is see rare and none!

 

I know what you mean about older American cars in terms of problems and being lucky to make it to 100K miles. Currently, Japanese cars are overall more reliable than domestics. But European cars, esp. German ones are generally worse than American cars, esp. brands like VW, some Audis and Mercedes.

When you speak of these domestic companies, are you talking about domestic car companies or domestic companies in general? Most of the vehicles sold by the Big 3 are made in the US and Canada. Ones made in Korea, Mexico and elsewhere are a SMALL minority.

There are TONS of ads for the Prius and Hybrid Synergy Drive here in California, and that's considering I blow through most of the ads on TV since I have Tivo.

 

Malorn,

You are comparing apples to oranges.

The 35 MPG figure for the Prius came from Consumer Reports. It was their observations of the car's performance in their very demanding city driving cycle. It was not the results obtained from a leisurely 375 highway trip such as you report for the LaCrosse.

Take a look at page 59 pf the March 2005 issue of Consumer Reports. CR tested the LaCrosse and listed their mileage test figures at 12 city / 30 highway / 18 overall (did you notice that they got the same highway figures you did?). If that does not convince you, jayman's calculations for his parents' car, when not using air conditioning, are 19 miles per Imperial gallon (15 miles per US gallon).

Thus comparing apples to apples, using the results of the same Consumer Reports test for both cars, which one is better, the 12 MPG in the Buick or the 35 MPG in the Prius? The answer is crystal clear, the Prius gets almost three times the mileage.

 

Many good points are made about Toyota on here, but you are not making a very intelligent statement here Windstrings. What are you talking about. If Toyota would have been a bigger player in the US 40 years ago, GM would not be in business?

 

What I mean't was that toyota has alway built such a better more reliable rig "to my knowledge" that GM would not have had the market so cornered. People would have had a "better" choice and GM would have never grown as big as it did!

As soon as Toyota and other imports came into the picture, GM started loosing popularity... they did improve due to having a formal competitor, but they never regained thier control and have been losing ground ever since. I'm not an expert on automotive history.
You are free to disagree.... thats just from where I'm standing.

 

Actually in the mid to late-seventies, GM sold more than half the vehicles sold in the United States. At that point the federal govt began discussions about breaking up GM like AT&T. Toyota had been selling vehicles in the US for twenty years at that point and really was not all that strong. In fact GM, Ford and Chrysler made a collosal blunder by letting dealers sell Toyotas out of the same showroom as the domestic brands. If they had prohibited that there is not telling where Toyota and Honda would be today. By the way, this one of the reasons that NO foreign brand has ever been able to gain a foothold selling vehicles in Japan.

 

"I think you will be impressed and we have customers getting 35 mpg on highway trips. The same as a few of you get with your Prius."

Sorry, this is just so far from reality it can't go unchallenged!

Buicks always get over EPA? My '94 Regal barely managed 20mpg in mixed highway, suburban driving. Under identical conditions and the same route, averaged over a year, my Prius nevern gets under 45.

With the sharing of platforms, engines, assembly lines there is little difference between a Chevy, Buick, Pontiac... under the skin they are nearly identical, as they have been for 30-35 years.

I've regularly driven three Buicks with poor results.

1) '73 Apollo (aka Chevy Nova, Olds Omega, Pontiac Ventura), with a decent 350 V-8 and 16 mpg (for a COMPACT!). Reliable, though--no problems in over 100K miles
2) '81 Apollo (same brethren, among the first FWD GM cars)--total crap. Never more than 22mpg with a 4-banger, unrepairable steering gear, awgul tranny, terrible interior quality.
3) '94 Regal. Great power, lousy mileage, went through 3 batteries and 3/4 alternators in about 100K miles, tranny made awful noises in reverse when I traded it in, wind noise in door was never fixed by dealer.

Never got EPA mileage, quality (except for the '73) was poor. 0 for 3 so far.

 

I'll have to agree with you on that point Malorn!... the key was people didn't trust nor know about the foreign rigs until someone they trusted introduced them!... Once that happened it was too bad so sad for GM.. they let the cat out of the bag!" There was no turning back after that!

GM thought they were so secure and powerful, they could not be touched and could play with fire.... NOT!