Quote:
Originally Posted by oldtamiyaphile
Even against the more practical Civic, the Insight would have to cover over 1 million miles to break even.
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How on Earth do you figure that? The 2000 Insight was about $21K new (US). In 2000, Honda offered 11 models, at prices ranging from $10,750 to $20,230:
2000 Honda Civic Reviews, Specs and Prices The average over all models is $14712, so make that a price difference of $6288.
From the above link, you can see that the Civic averages about 35 mpg. I've averaged a real-world 71.2 mpg in mine, so to make the math easy, I'll say a Civic would have averaged exactly half that. My Insight has about 190K miles now, which required 2668.5 gallons of gas. At $3/gal, which I think is a reasonable average over the 15 years since 2000, that's $8005.62, and that's the extra amount it would have cost to drive the Civic the same distance. In other words, even if I had bought my Insight new, I would now be over $1700 ahead of the average Civic, having driven less than a fifth of that million miles.
Now the other issue here is practicality, and for me the Insight is much more practical: it's small, nimble, doesn't waste space on four seats & doors that I never need, has a hatchback instead of a trunk so I can carry bikes, dogs, airplane parts or bags of horse feed... In fact, the nearest equally practical for me car in 2000 would have been the Mazda Miata, MSRP $20-25K and just under 30 mpg.