I hadn’t heard that. We kinda thought that this will be my wife’s last car, so our estate can settle that. She has only put 250 miles on it in seven weeks. The EPA says that it saves $4,000 in fuel costs in 100,000 miles. It goes for $11,000 more than the conventional engine model, but we get $9,000 in state and federal tax credits and rebates. The electric model is smoother, quieter and more powerful. Even in hybrid mode it gets 38 mpg. Thing is, even if there is shortage of gasoline because of distribution problems, we can still get to the grocery store.
I worked with a guy who commuted about 100 miles round trip every day. After 250,000 trouble-free miles his Prius crapped out. He didn’t have to pay for a disposal fee. Not yet anyway. He bought a second Prius.
Prius....
I heard from a tow truck driver that the early designs of Prius, when the battery had to be replaced for a lot of money, the owners one by one all said “Oh, I’ll get along running it as 100% gas now.” He said the company caught on and made it mandatory to replace the expensive battery when it went bad.
Like the first catalytic converters owners cut off and threw them away but in later years the engine and sensor for back pressure of the exhaust system sensed there was no converter and didn’t keep running. That’s what someone told me.
All that is secondhand knowledge so I might be wrong if he was. Sounds like human nature, though. Mother Jones had a cartoon showing a guy with his nose held high driving a “Pious.” I did not buy the issue-—just saw the cartoon.