I agree, I rarely buy a car as an investment. I buy it for it's potential to satisfy my needs. Why aren't CR , Edmunds etc. carping about the investment potential of an SUV or Minivan? Because there isn't any! And it really irks me to keep seeing the Prius compared to compact cars. Compare it to mid-size, high mileage cars. Can't find too many? Hmmm.

 

Investment?Who suggested a car was an investment?Not me.
I was making a crude rough and ready comparison between two vehicles I was considering buying. The Fit would have been a tiny bit cheaper to own over about 100,000 miles. It would have worked OK for my needs; it had to be able to fit 2 long legged dogs in the back. Both the Fit and the Prius can do that. It also had to get very good mpg for two reasons; to keep operating costs down, and to keep my irritation level down. I check the price of oil everyday. For the last 4 weeks oil has been heading up, and my irritation level has been heading up also. I spent $26,000 to decrease my irritation level. Now when oil goes up, I'm happy because I have a car that gets 40-50 mpg. When oil goes down, I'm happy because I'm paying less for gas.
A Matrix would be a better match for the Prius in size-interior space. I considered it, but CR is right-it does have a strange "reach for the wheel" and it doesn't get great mpg. It gets very good mpg, but I needed great automatic trans mpg to lower my irritation level-Civic,Civic Hybrid,Corolla,Echo,Scion,Fit type numbers.
My perfect travel vehicle would be a Hybrid hatchback Camry-4 cyl hybrid, but lighter and lower than the current HH with much better city and hy mpg. A hatchback gives up nothing aero drag wise,and probably very little weight wise. SUVs are great travel vehicles, but the wt ,drag, and big engines are too thirsty. A HH with a 4 cyl , lower ride height,lower CD,and 3800 lbs is a Camry Hatchback Hybrid. I need to be able to sleep in the back of a travel vehicle.I can do that with the Prius(air mattress).Of course, I have to fight Phoebe(dog not wife) for the mattress.We travel in the Pilot now, but we might try the Prius next trip.It won't be as comfortable, but it will work ok.Thanks,Charlie

 

Fixed it for you.

 

I agree that 40mpg is a low estimate but 51.9 is clearly too high. Why not just use the average of the database for the Prius? The average is 47.5 and includes ALL the miles for all the cars not just a cherry picked selection.

 

I think he used the average MPG for the long distance cars which agrees with what I find for highway MPG for my NHW11, Prius I. It would be unfair to use the average not derived from highway or long distance mileage, don't you think?

Bob Wilson

 

Are you kidding? All driving is equally significant since it's all real driving that people do, so of course it counts as much as any other form. Two cars can get equal highway mileage but much different city mileage, so the average mileage of the car with better city mileage will of course be higher, for good reason.

Every car counts as much as every other. By the way, there are many people that simply didn't bother updating the database after their first few tanks. Most people don't care enough to constantly go to this website and update their mileage, but that doesn't mean their data is any less meaningful. And the people that do keep coming here are largely the hypermilers so that's why you see higher mileage from the people that update often.

 

No but sounds like you are.

Mr. Monkey had properly qualified the selection criteria, cars with more than 40,000 miles. I would have probably qualified it it by trip duration, a better indicator of highway vs. city trips. Still it is a good 'first cut.'

I believe Jason posted that he uses the average of each car, not evenly weighted for each mile. Mr. Monkey properly qualified and explained his data.

It is the only data we have.

Personally, I would prefer use of the EPA numbers. They are reproducable if you are willing to drive the EPA profile. Curiously, I don't drive the EPA 45 mpg profile for my Highway miles since I have a better set of data.

Bob Wilson

 

Um, the average person drives 15000 miles per year. Therefore you are automatically excluding almost every single person that bought their car within the last 2.5 years.

Correct; Jason calculates the average of everyone's mileage, which is exactly what he should use. It counts each car equally.

But people don't. And TDIs allegedly get much better highway mileage than the Prius or Civic hybrids, yet their EPA highway score is only 42 or so. The Prius and Civic hybrids have equal highway scores (51) but they don't really get equal highway mileage for most people.

 

Since he qualified the data, no fault or foul. He didn't propose it as the 'average' but what people who put a lot miles on their Prius are getting. But I would have prefered seeing averages based upon trip duration.

I don't have any problem with that other than it is not very useful predicting MPG based upon one's driving profile. With my data, I can expect better 54-50 mpg by keeping my highway speed between 55-70 MPH.

Sounds like a problem for the TDI drivers. The GreenHybrid drivers have a larger sample set from which we can make reasonable performance charts. The only thing missing is MPH but hey, the data is free and can be loaded into an Excel spreadsheet.

Bob Wilson

 

Well there is the "average speed" field (like "At Speed Limit", "+20% of Limit", etc.) but that's not very useful.