I figured it was time for a Prius update as last week marked the 4th month we've owned our little white driving appliance. In that time we've logged over 10,000mi, including a 3800mi road trip to the East Coast to visit family and get some R&R. Similar to what I reported in month 1, we've saved a ton on gas and maintenance and have yet to find a situation where we needed a bigger vehicle (although as you can see we pushed the limits of that on our road trip).In that time we've averaged 43mpg (42 on our trip with the car fully loaded running 70-75mph) which amounts to about $1400 in gas savings over 4 months compared to the 15mpg we were averaging in the Sequoia. Even factoring in $300 in tires (2 of which were emergency replacements on our trip) we've still ended up with quite a bit of extra cash in our pockets.
Aside from being excited about the Prius having a timing chain (Sequoia was due for a timing belt which is a massively painful job on a quad cam v8 and took me 2 weekends to complete on our LS400), maintenance costs are another area of savings I hadn't considered as part of our purchase research. That said, having about the same mileage, both the Sequoia and Prius were due for a helping of fresh $8/qt Toyota WS ATF transmission fluid, the difference being that 16qts were required for the Sequoia vs. only 4 for the Prius! Even things like oil changes are quite a bit less expensive as the Prius only takes 4qts and doesn't require synthetic due to the fact that the IC engine doesn't have to work very hard being supplemented by the electric motor, something that hopefully also leads to a long life because we plan to drive it until the wheels fall off...
No comments:
Post a Comment