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After much research and many delays, Kim and I have finally bought a new car. It's a 2005 Toyota Prius, and we're already loving it. These things are hard to find: there's about a six week delay if you want to order one with the exact option package and color that you want, and when they do show up for sale on dealers' lots they tend to sell very quickly.
Kim and I lucked out with this one: we've been planning a car trip for this summer, but Kim's work vacation schedule suddenly shifted so we had just a few weeks to find a new car rather than a few months. That made a special order out of the question, but amazingly, someone else had ordered exactly the car we wanted and their financing fell through. (You don't even want to know how long and carefully Kim had to monitor how many local car dealers before we hit the jackpot.) So we rushed to the dealership yesterday, and came home with the shiny new car you see below. (A couple more pictures can be found on my website.) We drove the car 50 miles from the dealership to an errand or two and then home, at an average mileage of 49 MPG. Pretty sweet.
Kim and I lucked out with this one: we've been planning a car trip for this summer, but Kim's work vacation schedule suddenly shifted so we had just a few weeks to find a new car rather than a few months. That made a special order out of the question, but amazingly, someone else had ordered exactly the car we wanted and their financing fell through. (You don't even want to know how long and carefully Kim had to monitor how many local car dealers before we hit the jackpot.) So we rushed to the dealership yesterday, and came home with the shiny new car you see below. (A couple more pictures can be found on my website.) We drove the car 50 miles from the dealership to an errand or two and then home, at an average mileage of 49 MPG. Pretty sweet.
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After six months, my average is definitely 45 MPG. I've gotten as high as 48 MPG on one tank, but I get only 42 MPG on my short (15-minute) commute to work, which always brings the average down.
What package did you get?
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The one point of less-than-perfect fit between what we wanted and what we got was that the people who originally ordered it had also accepted the dealer's "environmental protection package": extra (and from what I've heard, unnecessary) sealants or protection for the underbody, the paint, and the interior. That added hundreds of dollars to the asking price for the car, and in general we weren't willing to pay for dealer add-ons like that. (The mental image that immediately came to mind was William H. Macy's character in Fargo saying "See, they install that TruCoat at the factory, there's nothin' we can do...")
But we have a driving vacation planned a few weeks from now, and if we hadn't bought this car we would have had to rent one (and pay more for gas along the way). So we were able to negotiate the price of the unwanted add-on package down to be comparable to the cost of a rental car for our trip, so that buying the car now at least wouldn't lose us money. It may not be perfectly rational, but at least it made me feel better about the deal. :) And hey, if there is any real value to the "TruCoat", we got an awfully good deal on it (paying well under half of its list price).