Bigger, faster new Prius hybrid's pretty slick (But, a new battery is $4,000??)

usa today ^ | 11-9-03 | jim healy

[Clinging Bitterly]

>> Satan manages VW dealerships...

I dunno. I think Satan manages some of the other ones too. But I did once buy a new VW GTI from our then local VW dealer. That particular model was brand new then and basically sold to willing buyers at sticker price, $7990.00 as advertised on national TV (there were maybe three available options which, added together, were just a few hundred more). Twenty-something guys (like I was at the time) were grabbing up this first "pocket rocket" like candy. I kept mine for about a year, it didn't handle at all well in the conditions I drove in the most (though the Pirelli P6 tires did stick real good to snow and ice, they were lousy on plain wet roads).

But the dealer had that VW store and a couple other dealerships around town for other brands, and they all had a "system" that was becoming known around town. Pretty high pressure, they tried their darndest to keep a shopper in custody until they signed a deal. But I think they are all that way now. About ten years ago I toyed with the idea of buying a new Pontiac, and I visited the dealer to give one a try. I liked the car and wanted to make a deal for one, but things started out poorly with the dealer's initial trade in offer, and things escalated to a situation I'd have to describe as just bizarre. Finally I had to bust into the "war room" where I intended to gather my keys and say my goodbyes. It was clear pretty quick that they didn't want me in that room, and, as I told them, I was fine with that. All they needed do was return my property and I would gladly leave their property once and forever, but if that didn't happen more or less instantaneously I was going to start tearing things apart until I found my keys, and then I swiped my arm across a desktop and cleared it. So a guy came up and handed me my keys and started shoving me out of the room. I didn't take kindly being shoved like that so I resisted with everything I had. A couple of other guys grabbed him and held him back, telling him they didn't want the cops in there. That was that, there was no more pushing. I walked out, made some noise in the showroom on the way out, and left. The cops did come about a week after that. It was a raid with guns & handcuffs and the whole bit, and they did tear the place apart. Turns out they weren't paying off people's trades, so they were essentially selling used cars for which they didn't have titles. I would likely have lost my trade in car and still had to pay it off had I bought that day, but my sense of smell paid off. And this was an established, popular new car dealerhip that was pulling this scam.

[Axenolith]

WOW!

In our case, I should have specified the service department. They literally were the pinch reason we went with a Saturn LW300 for the wifes car after they gave her a lot of grief on a silent recall item on her Passat.

One of my coworkers and her roomate both had Jettas, and she was commenting to me one day on how their dealers service people (a completely different one) had made her cry.

It's a shame too because they do make a pretty tight car...

[Clinging Bitterly]

>> they do make a pretty tight car...

They do, or at least did. I always thought the Jetta was decent enough.

One of the things I liked about VWs from "back then" was the design of the sliding sunroof. Before I bought the GTI I had an old '76 German built Rabbit and it had one. Nice, easy to crank back into the roof, not real noisy and it didn't leak.

When I bought the GTI it was available with the same roof so I bought it, and it never leaked. But I did have a water adventure in the thing, went through a drive through car wash when it was nearly new and probably a couple gallons of water poured on to my feet from somewhere under the dash. I took it straight to the VW dealer's service department while my heels were still under the standing water on the floor. They started out being butts about the whole thing, accused me of going through with the sunroof or the windows open, so I asked them to explain the dry cloth seats.

They took a hose to it and sprayed everywhere & found no leaks. They went back to the same car wash with it and not another drop got in. We never did find out what caused it but it didn't happen again. They just guessed that some pine needles or something temporarily clogged a drain in the heater box. It was summertime and they got the car dried out good in a couple days and other than the alternator failing while still in warranty it didn't give me any more problems (other than it's general unsuitability for driving conditions in this area).

I traded it off before it was a year old and got high book - it was one of the few used GTIs found on local lots that had not been wrecked.

But that VW dealership (and the other stores in the same owner group) did end up getting busted by the state for some of their trade practices, and the owner was given the choice of selling all the stores or going to jail, so he sold.

But several of the other personalities involved in that dealership, including the service manager, did have legal problems later on. The manager now runs a local herd of vacuum cleaner salespeople, and some of the others were ferreted out in the implosion of that Pontiac dealer I mentioned upthread. The service manager went on to run his own used car lot, and he got in trouble for much the same things as that Pontiac outfit.

From what happens in that business in this town, it seems as though it's not profitable to go about selling cars in an honest, straightforward manner.

Today, about 2/3 of the local new car dealerships are under one locally owned partnership, formed by a merger of the two most established family owned outfits, and the other third belong to a regional publicly traded company (the only one I've heard of that's in that business). The way things are arranged, you can buy any brand from either of the two companies, but that's all there are - just the two.

[steppenwolffe]

Hey, I remember that place! It was run by Vito and Guido Legbreakers for their uncle on Chicago's south side!

Seriesly, that's one freaky tale.

[Skibane]

With, what, a 67 HP engine, and it's delivering 67HP performance. And a conventional car with that kind of power could easily deliver the stated 55 MPG. Yeah, I'm not keen on buying all that extra hardware to get the same, or not much better, mileage than I would otherwise get.

What's buried in the specs is the electric motor's contribution. IIRC, it's capable of producing almost 300 ft-lbs of torque! Hybrid horsepower isnt' the same as internal-combustion engine horsepower, due to the differences in the way electric motors behave at low speeds. Essentially, you have full rated torque available at zero RPM. That's why the Prius is faster off the line than the horsepower specs would imply.

While it's true that some micro-cars have touched the 50 MPG mark, you won't find any Camry-sized conventional vehicles capable of getting almost 60 MPG (almost double the 4-cylinder Camry's mileage, BTW).