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There is a point in the life of cars as rare as the Insight where people will hoard them for parts. With the battery rebuilding operations fading away, owners are faced with a large expense for a replacement battery and the life expectancy of those replacements is no where near the life of original equipment (new) batteries.
I owned one a while back and while it got great mileage, it had $7000 in warranty work done in 32k miles, from 35 to 67k miles when I sold it. That amount of warranty work in that short period of time convinced me to sell the car.
Sometime several years ago I predicted the situation where the cost of the battery would exceed the value of the car. Combined with all the other age and mileage related repairs, some owners are ready to bail out of their Insights.
No need to trash me for my opinions, I paid $10k for mine and loved the mileage. I talked to another Insight owner once riding on the Scotland Neck ferry. They had paid $5k for a battery but felt it was OK in lieu of the high fuel economy. I guess they went for a new battery at that price, but without a source of new batteries, reasonably priced the point where the cost of a battery exceeds the value of the car needing a battery, has probably been reached.
regards
Mech
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