Is a Hummer cleaner than a Prius?

Whoa! You’re driving like we do—more, matter of fact, some pretty heavy mileage there.

We would put the mileage like I told you and then I would sell the vehicle locally, clean them up nice, have them serviced one more time and then darn if we wouldn’t see them for several years afterwards, no telling how many miles those cars stacked up. They were usually poor folks looking for something they could afford that had been treated right, regardless of miles.

All we do is make sure oil is changed regularly and small things taken care of before they develop into big problems.

About a year ago or so, Popular Mechanics had interesting articles on cars with 250,000+ miles without major repairs, shoulda saved it, very interesting...

Fair? What's unfair about it? Do you, dear author, claim that all vehicles have the same service life? The fact

Oops! You misspelled "fantasy."

that the Hummer will last twice as long, in miles, as the Prius is precisely the issue!

No, not all cars have the same service life. Toyotas last a lot longer than GMs.

100,000 miles is just the warranty for the Prius' batteries. Hummers have the same length powertrain warranty. Did you click your ruby slippers together and land in a world where Toyotas break right after the warranty expires, but GMs last two or three times as long?

This piece has been thoroughly discredited on this forum several times and keeps reappearing. I'm wondering if it was written by someone at DU to make conservatives look bad.

Just to clarify, I meant the original piece comparing the “real” cost of the Hummer and Prius keeps reappearing. Not this one, which is more intelligently written and only references the original one.

Toyotas last a lot longer than GMs.

Irrelevant.

Does the Toyota Prius last longer than the Hummer H2?

I don't think so.

Overall reliability of the make is an pretty good indicator of how long the car will last. Remember, the batteries aren't the entire car. If the article had demonstrated that hybrid batteries drop dead, beyond repair, the moment the warranty expires (which of course it didn't even attempt to do, since there are no data out there to contradict Toyota's expectation that it will last 15 years) it's a similar cost to replacing an engine. Not at all the same as scrapping the car completely.

Your question, however, really is irrelevant. The ridiculous original per-mile cost numbers aren't based on the Hummer simply lasting "longer than" the Prius; they're based on it lasting 3x as long. If the Hummer lasts twice as long -- a claim for which no one on earth has any precedent -- the numbers still wouldn't add up. Maybe the Hummer can gain some efficiency by carrying more people per mile. I sure don't see that actually happening on the roads.

Full disclosure: I've never been in a Prius or a Hummer. My guess is they're both overrated, but it's just a guess.

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