Turds Day Rap Up
May. 18th, 2006 08:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
howeirdBusybusy at work today. Bad busy. Three customers are installing various things which connect to our servers, which I've never dealt with before, and neither have any of the other support guys. So I've had two engineers playing tag team at my desk showing me how it works, and discovering that it doesn't always, because there has been no QA outside of the engineers who wrote the code.
After work, went to Toyota of Sunnyvale's presentation on hybrid cars. Interesting stuff once the two marketing dweebs sat down and let the techie do his presentation. Tech guy really knew his stuff, was articulate, a very good presenter. Only gripe is they had the screen too low, so those of us in the back had to stand to see his slides.
There were sandwiches and water/pop and cookies. It was a full house, maybe 100 people. After the talk we got to look up close at the various hybrid models - Camry, Highlander and Prius. No mileage stickers and no price tags. I went out in the lot afterwards and saw why - $30k for a Prius, more for the other models. Compared to $17k for a Corolla. Let's do the math. The Prius on a good day gets 45mpg, my Corolla 30 mpg. At $3.50/gal, 20,000 miles per year, that's $2,300 a year on the Corolla, $1,555 on the Prius. A whopping savings of $745/year. My Corolla is paid off, which makes this a no brainer financially.
But for the sake of argument, say I was driving a $17k Corolla vs the basic $30k Prius. $13,000 diff would take me 17.4 years to make up in fuel costs.
I don't think so.
After work, went to Toyota of Sunnyvale's presentation on hybrid cars. Interesting stuff once the two marketing dweebs sat down and let the techie do his presentation. Tech guy really knew his stuff, was articulate, a very good presenter. Only gripe is they had the screen too low, so those of us in the back had to stand to see his slides.
There were sandwiches and water/pop and cookies. It was a full house, maybe 100 people. After the talk we got to look up close at the various hybrid models - Camry, Highlander and Prius. No mileage stickers and no price tags. I went out in the lot afterwards and saw why - $30k for a Prius, more for the other models. Compared to $17k for a Corolla. Let's do the math. The Prius on a good day gets 45mpg, my Corolla 30 mpg. At $3.50/gal, 20,000 miles per year, that's $2,300 a year on the Corolla, $1,555 on the Prius. A whopping savings of $745/year. My Corolla is paid off, which makes this a no brainer financially.
But for the sake of argument, say I was driving a $17k Corolla vs the basic $30k Prius. $13,000 diff would take me 17.4 years to make up in fuel costs.
I don't think so.
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Date: 2006-05-19 05:13 am (UTC)But even if I accepted your $23k price, that's still $6,000 more than the Corolla, and it would take 8 years to break even.
Remember, though, my Corolla is paid up and will last me another 7 years.
Kelly on my car is $3500, so if I traded it in now, it would only take me 26 years to break even at the resulting $19,500 sticker price.
It's a nice car, it drives well and doesn't spew much junk into the air. But it's a fiscal nightmare.