No Respect On The Freeway

Wow, what a lunatic.

I think it stinks.

 

I haven't really experienced any of that yet. Living in Atlanta you can't drive very much out of the norm without being eaten alive. I pretty much drive mine like I've driven every car I've ever owned. Maybe it's also because there are so many Prius's, Leafs, and Volts where I live. I was driving home from visiting my sister last week and I was behind a Prius and another was in the left lane next to me.

 

Same way in Chicago area. 6 or 7 years ago seldom see a Prius here but now all over the place. It's the price of gasoline here.

 

I see around ~300 Prii on my commute to work everyday haha (100miles).

The gasoline prices are insane! It's nice the Prius models are getting more affordable thou Not all Prius drivers drive nicely haha.

 

No they all fly by me like I'm standing still.

 

I had no choice but to tail someone who cut me off in rather dramatic fashion pulling out of a shopping center and then proceeded to accelerate slower than my Prius can in EV mode. Incidentally that was also how I learned that my Prius horn sounded like a little toy!

 

I had a Volt blast by me on the way back from an out of town trip. He must have been doing 100mph. Hybrid drivers don't drive like jerks around other hybrid drivers. Probably because there's safety in numbers. We're the ones who have evolved. Let Darwin (or Karma) take care of the rest

 

Hhahha it's a cute "meeping" sound Makes me want to use my horn more

Not tailgate, but getting cut off.. a lot haha..

 

I'm seeing a market for some after market Prius air horns. Maybe something that plays "Life in the Fastlane".

 

Haha yes! so true, i live outside of Nashville.
Truck and SUV drivers around here will do anything to not be behind a Prius, even if you're going 85 MPH. Silly people, i just enjoy the great MPG and mind my own business.

 

Here's a feel good article.
Does Nissan Leaf Supplant The Prius As Loathing Target For CA Drivers?

 

I don't understand why one would feel disrespected when someone pass you. Regardless of your speed, the left lane is a passing lane so keep to the right if you are not passing another vehicle. No matter what kind of vehicle you drive, there will be some tail-gaters on the road. It's not you and it's not what you drive, it's that donkey who tailgate another vehicle. Don't drive if you don't want someone passing you because in real life, you can't always be the fastest one on the highway. So live happily forever with your Prius.

 

Not only has everyone been passing my new PIP when I'm out driving, that includes other Prii at times. (To be fair, I am accelerating and decelerating much more slowly than I typically do. While I know the need for "breaking in" a new car engine is much less, if any, with the Prii, I still prefer to do it, and it doesn't seem completely unreasonable to me given that there's an ICE inside even if a smaller one. )

But I feel cars do it much more readily, even here.. and I live in perhaps the most eco-friendly, green-minded region in the world. The Tesla factory itself is just a few stops up the freeway.

(And then there was just the plainly visceral hatred on all the comments on the LS1-engine-inside-a-Prius-body project on some LS1 forum. That thread was almost pure vitriol, not just against the Prius but hippies, Obama, the environment, and everything people of a certain.. ideology have stereotypically associated with the car itself. Those guys were seriously going into near sexual bliss in anticipation of incinerating half a tank of gasoline to "blow away" actual Priuses and put Prius-lovers "in their place". )

 

I was reading an article about why not to buy a hybrid. The guy made an argument that you can get 40mpg with a much less expensive Yaris and that it takes 140k miles to make up the difference in cost. Maybe so but I don't want a Yaris. I bought the prius because it's a cool looking high tech vehicle I decided to buy. I could have bouhttp://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/3/christians-persecutioncomplex.htmlght a Beamer if I wanted but I never understood why anyone would want to pay 40k for one that's not much bigger and much less economical all the way around. How long would I have to drive that to justify its cost?

To make a long story short he ended his diatribe by saying if you own one it's only because you vote "left".

 

I think that you need to buy a Prius for the right reasons. My own reasons were that I wanted to reduce the amount of gas I used as well as the emissions I produced getting around town. I knew that extra money I spent on a Prius probably wouldn't compensate for the amount of money I saved on gas compared to something like a Corolla or Yaris, at least not for a decade or so, but saving money wasn't what I was going for.

I was also well aware of the reputation of Prius drivers before I purchased one and was more than happy to join their ranks

 

Happiness abounds, or the potential risks for it do, when anyone buys anything for the wrong reasons.

I think, in my case, and perhaps for many others, we all overpay for one thing or another, and have likewise witnessed many others overpaying by various measures even based on their subjective priorities. Just that sometimes it's not so bad overpaying in a way where you're more comfortable with the remaining unknowns.

Looking at my and my family's car ownership history, we've always carried them to the very end of their use (10 - 20 years per vehicle), so lack of appropriate and sufficient investment up front has left us feeling the consequences by the middle and end thirds of those lifetimes. That probably has more than a little effect on my current thinking of how to make car purchases. Those gas prices always stung too.

And my thinking on fuel cost is that I'm getting a good deal if I compare a hybrid Prius to a hypothetical all-gas Prius, not a more expensive car to a lower-cost different car. Certainly, I could overpay by taking the path of a sportier car that uses more gas but is "a (more) enjoyable drive", but the couple times I rented a Prius to try it out, I was grinning like a buffoon at getting 500 miles to a tank and happily smiling at everyone who angrily passed me on the road.

 

(Also, mileage on all our gas cars seemed to drop significantly earlier on, as soon as 3-5 years into owning them, than the impression I've gotten from the mileage falloff of Priuses over the same age scale. That, and the Prius is the only car that often seems to get mileage much better than the rated ~50mpg, whereas the mileages I've seen on gas cars always seem to be the absolute best possible one can get but rarely seems to.)

 

All of my cars but one (an '84) have displayed improved mpg with age. That includes a Suby kept 17 years, and an Accord kept 23 years. Or at least, if the raw machines degraded, it wasn't enough to overcome the improved tuning of the nut behind the wheel.

That '84 was my only car to always fall short, but it was also rated under the most optimistic version of the EPA scale, obsoleted long ago. Subsequent EPA scale revisions made it easier to beat the label, and only one of my cars since then fell short, when new. But it handily beat the rating towards the end of its life. My Prii haven't beat their EPA ratings by as large a percentage as my non-hybrids. The best performer percentage-wise was that Honda.

But MPG is also a function of climate, driver style, and local driving conditions. I'm not handicapped by urban California traffic.