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Old 09-12-2017, 10:29 AM   #23 (permalink)
elhigh
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Join Date: Jan 2008
Location: SE USA - East Tennessee
Posts: 2,314

Josie - '87 Toyota Pickup
90 day: 40.02 mpg (US)

Felicia - '09 Toyota Prius Base
90 day: 49.01 mpg (US)
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After subtracting the change I found in the damn-near-invisible console drawer, my price was about $4700. I don't know if that was a good price but I went looking for cars willing to spend up to $8500 or so, so getting to keep so much of my money felt like a win.

My experience with Prii is limited, being only in the one we have here at work and that almost exclusively on city streets. Never get much speed up, never get much distance on. And the thing is absolutely festooned with air fresheners, I hate it so hard when I have to get into that car, knowing when I come out I'm going to smell like the detergent aisle at the grocery store when I can stagger away from it.

It has some bad scuffs on the front bumper skin but I discovered over the weekend, while replacing the headlight bulbs, that removing the bumper skin is the work of just a few minutes. A new, painted bumper skin from Amazon is just $200, which will radically improve the front end's appearance.

I also noticed that the pans under the front are in rough shape, rough like as in "not helping much, you can tell by how they flap" and in dire need of reinforcement or replacement. No worries there, I still have plenty of coroplast and trim buttons.

This thing is going to wind up the daily driver for my kids, as one of them doesn't like driving a manual (he can but he calls it "too much to think about and still be safe") and the other doesn't currently have an income, so doubling their fuel economy is an easy win in my book.

For this first week at least, Sweetie, one boy and I are carpooling in it for a shakedown while we learn its nuances. And to help eliminate tester bias, I'm forcing myself to use the cruise control when on the highway. Locked in at 59 mph and in this no-AC/no-heat weather we have right now, that should provide a pretty good baseline for what we can expect from this car in a neutral setting. Since gassing up over the weekend, this morning when I handed the car over to Sweetie it was sitting at 47.3mpg.

And on the basis of the change found in that console drawer, I'm changing its name: Felicia.
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