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.
