We hit 130,000 miles with all the warranties expired…and the seats being just a critical bit less comfy. So we started looking. We’ve been saving up for years, just putting a little bit by in a special account, so the finance was there. We wanted a Subaru hybrid, but the long-awaited car had no cargo space. We looked at the Forester, and the mileage is much improved: 28\/32…from our 2004, which is 19\/25.
\nThen we got a look at the Prius V in the hotel portico down in Oklahoma, and decided to go to our local dealer and have a look and a test-drive.<\/p>\n
Well, we for very sure hadn’t intended to buy. We came to look. But the price is about the same as the Forester; the cargo room is there; the mileage is 44\/40, (more in town, yes) and the local Toyota dealer is under reconstruction and nearly impossible to get into, so they were getting lonely for customers: half their cars are warehoused; plus the national just came out with a zero-interest for 5 years deal, so we wouldn’t need to touch our ‘car fund’ except to dole out money from it monthly while continuing to feed it from the other end. It’s a very Buck Rogers car…we had a Mr. Toad moment; and it’s not hard to adapt re the driving. It’s got some interesting quirks—the fancy braking system can be grabby if you lead-foot the brakes—but it has power enough for the mountains, and windows are much larger than the standard Prius.<\/p>\n
And it would be under warranty the whole way.<\/p>\n
We signed the paperwork on a car they’ll have to bring in and modify to our specs; and then to our surprise, they said they wanted our car now, so despite the fact it was so filthy from the trip and still having baggage we’d not offloaded—we’d even hesitated to let them look at it—they wanted to get to work cleaning it up for sale and they offered us a used Prius until our car is ready. Well—we cleaned out the stuff, put it in bags, loaded it into the loaner Prius sedan and bade farewell to our faithful Forester.<\/p>\n
We opted for dark brown seats (less prone to show dirt) and the ‘sea glass green’ color. And we don’t know when it will be ready, but until then we get to practice on the loaner. It’s a big move, a change from driving essentially the same car, same controls, for 10 years, but driving places on half the gas is going to be nice. It’ll save us at least a thousand a year in gas cost, based on our usual 10,000 miles a year, and we’ll like that part. Exotic bits (hybrid drive and batteries) have an 8 year warranty, and there are cabs in NYC that have logged 600,000 miles on original batteries. So… we are the usual bit of OMG I can’t believe we did it mixed with ooooh, shiny!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We hit 130,000 miles with all the warranties expired…and the seats being just a critical bit less comfy. So we started looking. We’ve been saving up for years, just putting a little bit by in a special account, so the finance was there. We wanted a Subaru hybrid, but the long-awaited car had no cargo […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":751,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/751"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5004\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}