It almost feels like I'm driving a computer with wheels. And it looks like I will have to buy a smart phone as many of the applications that run on the display need Internet access via a smart phone.. But alas Verizon still has not come out with a 4g version of the smart phone, so I wait.
My out the door price was about $37,000. Originally they offered me a price of around $41k which gave me everything and the kitchen sink. After scratching off all the $2.4k bummer to bummer warranty for 5 years and 100,000 miles they offered me the same warranty for 8 years and 75,000 miles for $850. That I took. Then I had them scratch off the prepaid 5 year maintenance plan. It only extended the already 2 year maintenance plan which is standard by 3 years. That saved another $1500. They wanted me to spend $800 on special coating that protects the paint and a water proof treatment for the interior. I told them that I only park in garages and I can buy a few cans of scotch guard and do the interior myself. They wanted me to pay $800 on an alarm system and I asked them what was the likelihood that someone would record my dongle code as the car's computer will not start without receiving that code. Especially since I never push the dongle button which transmits the code but rather touch the car handle and let the car interrogate the dongle which is very short range and thus cannot be recorded from afar. He admitted that is was pretty unlikely. Included in that price was about $3k in state taxes. However I get a $2.5k federal deduction and a $1.5k rebate from the state of California. That will save me about $2.5k. So my out the door cost will be about $34.5k. So I wrote them a check for $34.5k. All that took about 3 hours and for the life of me I could not figure out how they could drag it out for so long. Maybe I should have showed up 1 hour before closing.
It comes with a 2 year free subscription to satellite radio. The battery has a 150,000 mile warranty. The hybrid system has a 100,000 mile warranty.
The energy consumption monitoring is greatly enhanced on the plug-in Prius. It even keeps track of your consumption efficiency for the last year's worth of driving. It has Trip A and Trip B functions that allow you to measure consumption from when they are reset. And it shows you a detailed bar graph of your consumption for the last 30 minutes. As you drive it tells you whether your are driving in the most energy efficient modes or in less efficient modes. With that you can train yourself to be light on the foot. When I drove the car home my mileage was 68 miles per gallon in the city and the EV batter was not charged so I didn't get the advantage of having 13.2 miles of pure electricity. Since I charged it last night I will see how that impacts my consumption today when I do detailed road testing.
I have an electrician coming on wed. who is going to replace my current single 100A electric service with a two meter 200A service and he will add a an 80A circuit panel in the garage with a charging plug that will be tied to the second meter. Once that is done I will call the electric company and they will come out and add a second meter to the new meter panel and then add the second meter as an EV service allowing me to get electricity at 12 cents per KWH when I charge at night. The original meter that connects to the rest of my house will keep the old service plan.
With this setup it will cost me about 3 cents per mile when in EV mode. At $4.50 a gallon that is equivalent to 150 miles per gallon. I can live with that. With my driving habits I expect to be filling up my car about ever 6 to 8 weeks but that will yet to be seen.
The car has a timer so you can tell it when it is allowed to charge. The lower rates start at 9:00 in the evening so I set the timer to that and then plug in the car. Then at 9:00 it will start charging.
Up to now I have been getting 50 miles to the gallon on the old Prius. I'm estimating that I will get about 120 miles to the gallon with this plug-in Prius which is an average of EV mode and hybrid mode in terms of equivalent cents per mile. This means that gasoline pretty much has to get $10.80 a gallon before it cost me as much as it has been with my older Prius. And to tell you the truth, it seems like I almost drive for free already. From my perspective, if you are complaining about gas prices, that is due to a personal decision to own a car that is not efficient because you don't need to be in that situation now days.
