Hey buddy, wanna buy a Prius?
Sun, 08/03/2008 - 08:16 — SmartE
Toyota Prius (Prii?) are hard to find. There are currently no new Prius models on the lots of any Toyota dealer in our area (East Tennessee).
Toyota can't make them fast enough. From the Detroit Free Press
Toyota has also struggled this year to produce enough small cars and Prius hybrids to keep up with customer demand. Sales of the Prius, Toyota’s best selling hybrid, declined 8% in July to 14,785.
Batteries are the critical path. From FTD.de
Waiting lists for Priuses have expanded sharply as demand outstrips the Japanese carmaker's capacity to build the petrol-electric hybrid vehicles. Toyota - normally a paragon of supply-chain management - admits to "bottlenecks", particularly in batteries, which have slowed turnover even as drivers clamour for more fuel-efficient cars.
This has created a hot market for used Prius:
According to data released by the Power Information Network, the average used Prius with 8,000 miles on the odometer is selling for $1,300 over the suggested retail price of a new one. What’s more, even a Prius with 22,000 miles sells for just $276 less than a brand new one.
Glad we got ours last year, just in time to get the tax credit (which has now expired):
(Sorry, ours is not for sale.)
Comments
Greetings, "SmartE." ;>)
Factcheck' here. Finally registered and this name seemed good. Belated congrats for this new site too. The era of fossil fuel alternatives is finally here to stay, whether it's good, desired or not. They can't stop it this time.
Anyway, I recently remembered how the slow selling Honda Insight could be obtained fairly cheaply back when gas was cheap--way back about a year ago! Heck, the new ones just sat on the lots not too long before that. I thought a used one might be worth ten grand or so as a nice commute vehicle. As suspected, though, there were only two I could find nationally on eBay. One was around $7k but had very high miles and the other was in the teens and still bidding upward. Hah!
The wife and I were talking about our cars today. Sorta wish we had bought the Prius we looked at last year, since we'd have it paid down a little by now and could enjoy the "savings," but my plan now is to hope both our cars last well enough for at least two more years, when I hope they'll be some plug-ins coming onto the market. I think it's fair to say that GM is banking the entire future of the company on the Volt. Too early to say whether one will be in our garage, but it's a very exciting vehicle. So I'm Volt here.
Hey, good to see you here,
Hey, good to see you here, thanks for signing up. I'm looking forward to a plug-in Prius. Hopefully late next year?
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