Gadgetory

it's a bonafide auto industry home run yet one of the most sneered at cars on the market an efficiency masterpiece yet kind of hard to justify in dollars and cents and it's a category of one let's take a look at the Toyota Prius family and check the tech okay look we've looked at tree I a hundred times I've taken you through the Prius see the little tiny one the prius v the bigger one and a couple times through the prius prius this one let's not rehash what the car is and the details of the cabin tech nothing dramatically different there instead let's talk about the reason you buy this car and there's really one well there's really about 50 and there they are this car gets a real world combine on the road 50 mpg or there abouts all the time that number there and that's actually kind of low for my experience with this car over a period of 580 some odd miles and that wasn't babying it not what i was driving it and if you want further proof check this out there's a four month rolling history of this particular prius in the hands of automotive journalists and they don't baby anything look at that guy it got down as low as what 45 average one month this car is an MPG rockstar and that's part of why it out sells all the other hybrids by like two-to-one but the elephant in the room or on the dash remains that hybrid penalty the concept that you pay more for a hybrid with the electric motor and all those batteries and have to earn that back with MPG savings let's do the numbers okay the sales weighted average mpg of a new passenger car today the government says is 33 mpg that sounds a little lofty based on how they calculated it but let's give it to them the prius of course does 50 the average new car today cost about twenty eight thousand four hundred a prius that is well equipped but not top-of-the-line about thirty one five a difference of around thirty one hundred dollars as of today gasoline is about 385 a gallon in the US more like five bucks here in california and fifteen thousand miles a year is the average driving so you'd be saving at least six hundred bucks a year in fuel and would earn back the hybrid penalty on this car in about five point two years but if you're in california much sooner if you drive a lot sooner still if you high per mile even sooner the big variable of course is the cost of what other car you're considering and how many miles you really drive and what you pay for gas you can get a car that basic does what this does in terms of function for thousands less but you can't get anything that will touch it in terms of real-world gas efficiency so whether or not it's right for you is not just a matter of numbers it's got to be a matter of commitment and whether this car says something that you like