Prime destined to be doa?

my mind is still writing checks my body can't cash...

 

If you want to give a dealer $30k for a car, how do you do it without a check?

 

bitcoins?

 

Paypal
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My grandpa walks in with $30k in cash. He bought a Chevy Colorado last week.

I paid $13k in cash for my PiP.

My previous car was financed (2% interest, same as the interest on my checking account at the time), so they gave me a pre-approved note to pay for the vehicle.

When I bought my house, I put 20% down with a cashier's check.

On a tangent thought- paper money should be phased out entirely.

 

you think? i was thinking we should go back on the gold standard. we can't even decide to get rid of the penny.

 

Gold is fine, even coins, I just think paper money has served its purpose and should retire. Most $100 bills are kept in foreign countries. Most illegal activity is facilitated by large denomination paper money. Eliminating paper currency would slightly reduce illegal activity by making it more difficult to launder money. Speaking of laundering cash; it isn't particularly durable, with notes having relatively short lifespans before being destroyed and new notes being created.

Coins could still be carried for the increasingly rare instances when physical money is needed. Nobody is going to rob a bank and steal a million in coins.

Freakonomics recently had a short podcast on the subject.

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/still-using-cash/

... and mostly, I'm getting tired of my roommate paying rent in $20 bills. I don't go to banks anymore, so thousands end up collecting in a drawer until I get around to it.

 

sadly - across the nation there have been many a person who had legitimate interests in carrying huge amounts of cash for some legal transaction when they got pulled over. In some cases it almost feels like it takes an act of Congress to get that money back - as many police departments presume automatically that there is some kind of illegal / IRS violating /drug involved crime going on. This is the reason why Tesla refuses to even allow you think of coming into their store with a briefcase full of cash to pay for your car. It has to be a bank related transaction. They don't want their company used (potentially) as a money laundering mechanism for illegal activity. Welcome to the world of George Orwell
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Be aware that phasing out paper money ensures financial privacy is "phased out" as well. Having EVERY financial transaction of your life being available to every government and financial institution is pretty much guaranteed if all cash is electronic. I'm not sure you are for that side effect as well.

 

I tend toward libertarian and hold a high value for having as few rules and regulations as possible, but I don't envision a problem with there being a record of financial transactions. My finances are already nearly 100% electronic and have a record of transactions behind them, and I haven't suffered negative consequences. Besides, the government would still need a subpoena to access those records.

Most internet traffic has a record, and that's perhaps more telling about a person than their financial transactions.

Loss of certain types of privacy are inevitable as technology marches on. Once electronic transfer of funds becomes free or extremely cheap, it will make cash transactions as relevant as check transactions are today. The convenience of it outweighs the potential for the government to subpoena my records and use it against me.

If you think loss of financial privacy is scary, just hold on to your hat when the future starts keeping record of your reliability as a customer. All those Ebay, AirBnB, and Uber ratings will be aggregated into a single customer rating like a FICO score, and businesses will base their willingness to transact with you on it.

 

October sales of the Prius were 5,421 compared to last years 9,611. Prior months were down, but not by that much. YTD is down 12.8% overall for the Prius (83,569 versus 95,862). Maybe some of these missing buyers are waiting for the Prime. If Toyota sells 30,000 Primes per year in the US, then that 12,000 defecit so far this year shouldn't be much of a problem.
RT

 

no, there is a safety recall, and a stop sale order, delaying all prius sales for a few weeks. i'm sure some potential prius buyers are waiting for prime though, i hope you're right about 30k a year!

 

Well, the new PiP (Prime) is doing quite well, which I am very happy for. I miss the forum and Toyota. I still have my 2012 PiP. But now I have my 2015 model S 85D. I've purchased 5 Priuses, but I don't see myself getting a 6th. Model 3 doesn't quite do it for me and neither does the Prime. Perhaps the Model Y will. I just can't buy another car that uses gasoline. I need a new pickup truck soon (2004 Chevy Colorado barely hanging together). I'd like to get an EV pickup truck, but it hasn't been made yet. Hopefully Toyota will get more aggressive with hybrid trucks and cars, but for me, they are not the ones pushing the envelope anymore. Maybe in 2 more years the choices will be more rich in variety.

 

the envelope is fairly static these days, geopolitics being what they are. i would like a bev, but probably not until i can hop to florida with two charging stops, or chargers become more convenient.

as for model 3, looks like o/p is still waiting for his $35,000. version over two years later.

 

I wanna say @CPRaudio or someone else orginally started this thread...so it seems like the original Post#1 and maybe some other posts were deleted so the thread is a little out context. I've seen this happen on a few other threads before.

Seems to me orig post was questioning if Prime would sell, but orig OP was wrong in hindsight because sales have been super. I was trying to point out the key variable was availability of Ca. green HOV stickers, which we now know have been extended ad infinitum, which I had expected to see happen otherwise PHEV sales could have tanked.

 

makes sense. they are selling well outside of cali too, but only due to heavy discounting.

maybe they merged two threads? or there might be another similar one.

 

I do not know seems like some former members check out and then their posts are deleted.