We have two vehicles: a 2006 Honda CRV with about 175,000 miles, and a 1998 Honda Civic with about 240,000 miles.
My husband and I share the CRV. Dweezil, our college-age son, has the Civic. We’d decided some time ago that the next big repair bill it wanted would be its death knell.
Well, it failed inspection the other day: the shop wants 2,400 to replace the exhaust system. This means we have 6 weeks (the inspection dies in late November) to replace the car - with a blue-book value of about 400 dollars, it is not worth repairing.
So by default I looked at a new CR/V. The mileage for around town is 40 MPG in a hybrid vs 28 in a gasoline model. Most of our driving has been around down (though part of that is because, with such old cars, we tend to rent when taking a long driving trip). But for local driving there can be a fair bit of stop-and-go.
I have not done any cost comparisons re the pricing - and I’m leery of a hybrid CRV because this is their first production year.
But aside from that last concern: given those parameters, what kind of price difference would you think would make a hybrid worth considering? If it’s, say, 5,000 more to purchase?
The short-term would not see much in the way of savings - we simply are not driving that much. But if either of us ever goes back to an office, it could make a big difference.
I don’t have a hybrid, but one consideration is that the battery packs in hybrids have a limited lifespan of about 8-10 years. So if you typically keep your cars longer than that (which it looks like you do), you have to factor that (or seriously declining battery performance) into your cost estimates.
I have a 2005 Prius that I bought used. Two years ago (? - I posted a thread) one of the battery modules died. Toyota wanted $3,000 to fix it. I found a place in town that specialises in this sort of thing, and they fixed it for $1,500 and they have cell rebalancing free for life.
I’ve been happy with the Prius. I’m averaging almost 45 mpg. But I just got a case of sticker shock. Washington State now has a ‘hybrid tax’ of $75. That’s more than all of the other license fees combined. It cost over $143 to license my car this year. Very casual looking around a couple of years ago, it looked like new non-hybrid Prius-sized cars get about 35 mpg. If I could afford a new car, I might not get another hybrid because of the tax.
Virginia has an annual “personal property tax” which is based solely on the value of your vehicles. With our ancient cars, that’s now about 130 dollars a year in total. A new car will bump that up to well over a thousand.
Hybrid cars use less gas than non-hybrids. Roads are maintained through gas taxes. Less gas sold equals less revenue for roads. Since hybrids use the roads as much as a non-hybrid, the state reasons that there should be a way for hybrid drivers to pay their ‘fair share’.
I was upset when they imposed it, but over time it’s making more sense. They do need to do something to make up for the lost gas tax revenue. The current state tax on gas is $0,.494 per gallon. So, I’m paying as much tax as I would for 300 gallons of gas. At 30-45 miles per gallon, that’s the equivalent of 9,000 to 13,500 miles per year.
If those numbers are correct, then for every 10,000 miles you drive, you would burn 250 gallons in the hybrid, vs 357 gallons in the other car, for a savings of 107 gallons. At say 2.50 per gallon, that’s a savings of $267 per 10K miles. Not nearly enough to warrant spending an extra $5K on the vehicle.
You can do better, though. If you want a hybrid, look at a plug-in hybrid with an all-electric range of 30 miles or more. For city commuting, you will likely run on electric the vast majority of the time, and your effective mileage could be over 100 mpg.
But frankly, unless you need a vehicle that can go more than 250 miles at a time, I’d look at all-electric. Then you can ditch oil changes, spark plug changes, gasoline, transmission service, etc. The savings there could be as much as the savings in gas over the long run. To say nothing of the convenience of never having to stop at a gas station again. Servicing an electric car amounts to little more than lubricating moving parts, inspections for safety, tire rotation and coolant changes for the battery and high current electrical components.
An all-electric Chevy Bolt starts at $29,000, and has 259 miles of range. For a city car, that’s all you’d ever need. There are lots of cars in that class. If your state has a rebate for electric cars, it could be as cheap as a gas equivalent. Go up another 8,000 or so and you are in Tesla Model 3 territory.
I had a 2010 Prius which needed enough repairs that I traded it in earlier this year. No problem with the battery pack. The Toyota service guys said that they seldom saw problems with the battery packs. In fact my regular battery died after 9 years, which is pretty damn good.
I did not get a hybrid since I’m not doing enough driving now that I’m retired to make it worth it. It was nice getting 45 - 50 mpg when I went to LA, though. Whether it is worth depends on how much driving you do. I’d get a plug-in hybrid if I had decided to get one, since I’d seldom ever have had to buy gas when I was working. But this is a literally YMMV situation.
Good points - and that’s the sort of crunching I hadn’t yet done.
The price difference seems to be a bit smaller than I’d expected - maybe 3,000 dollars for hybrid.
All-electric does have a lot of appeal; the distance limit is of course a concern but of course it’d be perfect for a commuter car. I’d heard similar comments about how low maintenance they can be. The main problem I personally have, at this point, is that they all tend to be sedans, versus SUVs etc. - and I find a taller vehicle a LOT easier to deal with.
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I’ll have to look at whether there are currently any tax benefits to purchasing a hybrid or electric. They used to be permitted on the HOV-3 lanes near here but I think that’s been done away with.
If I had to buy my car all over again, I’d get the hybrid. The hybrid premium on my car was about $2500 which, based on the little that I drive, I decided wasn’t worth it. The EPA combined estimate is 27 mpg versus 42 for the hybrid. At 8,000 milers per year, I figured I would save about 100 gallons of gas per year and maybe $250. Even though I plan to own the car for 10 years or more, the time value of money made the cheaper car the better deal.
Then I learned how poor the real-world gas mileage of today’s small turbo engines is (or at least in my model). Real world, I get about 20 mpg. The hybrid version of the same car that I rented got 42 mpg. The hybrid felt a little more wobbly in corners than mine but, overall, the driving experience was almost exactly the same. So, if I’d gotten the hybrid, I would have saved about $500 per year in gas, felt better about my purchase, saved the environment, and been every bit as satisfied with the performance of the car. If gas prices go up, you’ll be even better off.
There are people in my neighborhood driving second generation (ca. 2005) Priuses on their original batteries. I read that Priuses are some of the cars that are owned the longest by their original owners, which means those people didn’t trade them in due to battery replacement costs or higher maintenance over time.
Well, like most longstanding policies, society backed into it and now finds themselves partly stuck.
After WWII when all cars got about the same mileage and the quantity of cars was exploding and with it the need to build and maintain ever more lane-miles of road, taxing gasoline as a rough proxy for taxing how much driving one did was a decent approximation.
And it was an easy tax to collect at the point of sale with no need for drivers to report annual mileage driven, etc. It’s a very hard tax to evade or game. That’s usually considered a good feature for tax design.
Fast forward to year e.g. 2000 and cars get fuel mileages ranging from 8 to almost 50 mpg. The tax policy is a lot less fair share at the extremes, but near the middle of the spectrum it’s not too crazy far off fair share.
With the nice feature that as a user you can choose to buy a tax-efficient vehicle or you can choose a tax-guzzler; the government isn’t forcing you either way. The fact many of the worst mileage cars are big expensive luxo-mobiles means the tax tends to have some progressivity which is generally a nice tax feature when we’re talking about taxing one of the practical necessities of modern life.
Now fast-forward to 2020 where WAG 5% of cars are electric or semi-electric. And predict forward to 2030 when it’s 30% or 2040 when its 60%. What are we gonna do to fund the roads?
There are now lots of all-electric vehicles in SUV form factor. The Kia Niro is highly rated, looks like a standard compact SUV. The Hyundai Kona is a subcompact all-electric suv. Both have ranges over 250 miles, and start at about $35,000. Audi, Jaguar and others make electric luxury SUVs as well if that’s your thing.
Plus the gas tax today is a bit regressive, since the extra cost of electric and hybrid vehicles means that the people buying them and getting the benefit of paying less in gas taxes are relatively richer.
I pay an extra $50 per year (I think, it might be more) for my electric car. I would much rather pay the flat tax than the other options, which would be something like a usage based tax, which would require government monitoring of mileage or location. That is not a path I want to go down.
One thing to keep in mind though is that while it may be the first year for that particular model, Honda has been making hybrids for over two decades now. I would assume that the drive train in the CRV is similar if not identical to that of their other hybrids.
Regarding the fuel savings, I actually did that number crunching as a project for my economics class in college, back when hybrids were still a fairly new thing. I don’t remember the exact numbers I came up with (although I do remember that I greatly underestimated the future cost of gas), but the basic just of my conclusion was that there are two scenarios where the fuel savings make up for the additional purchase price: 1) If gas is very expensive, or 2) You do a lot of driving. ETA: And then there are tax credits to factor in, if that’s something your state offers.
