Sunday, October 27, 2024

Goodbye to our 2008 Prius

Back in 2011, we replaced our 1996 Jetta with a 2008 Prius, and like with the Jetta, I signed away the title on the Prius to Good News Garage.  

As with the Jetta, I kept a record of all the maintenance receipts, gas receipts, and (most of) the tolls, so I have a reasonably complete dataset on the costs of owning this car for 13 years and 124k miles. 


Very roughly speaking, we're talking $4000/year, a little more than the Jetta**, and $0.42/mile, somewhat less than the Jetta.  Some interesting things to note:

  • Even though gas was more expensive during the lifetime of the Prius, averaging $2.997/gallon, we spent nearly $1500 less on gas vs the Jetta, because of the superior fuel efficiency of the Prius
  • We spent much less on insurance for the Prius, largely because I was a mid-20's unmarried male driver for the first three years of owning the Jetta.
  • We bought no significant accessories for the Prius; in the Jetta, we swapped out the cassette deck for a CD player.  The Prius came with a 6-CD changer.  The new car (a Hyundai Tucson PHEV) connects to our phones.  

** though my data on the costs of the Jetta did not include some costs that I captured for the Prius. 


2 comments:

  1. Alex, my previous was a 2007 and I got over 200k before I put it out to pasture. The car still drove many more miles (I gave mine away to family)! I bought mine with about 90k miles on it, so I got about 110k and change.

    My current car is another Prius! 2016, I just took it in for 90k service. I think I bought this one with about 60k on it. I adore this car, as much as I loved its predecessor.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Love it! When we bought the Prius it had 60k miles on it, so it did 184k before we donated it.

      Delete