I quickly skimmed the article; she says she drives a minivan.
Now, she mixes some truth in with her outright lies. Her "they don't get EPA mpg"(yeah,I'm paraphrasing her) is correct of course.However, what she leaves out is that most cars-driven by "average drivers"- don't get EPA city mpg in the city either.
It might even be true that the Prius is farther from EPA than the average car(probably gets 40-45 mpg city vs 60 EPA-say 75% of EPA).I haven't seen any good study of this, but I might buy that.We tend to get 13/17(76%) of EPA with the Pilot and 42/60(72%) with the Prius; Prizm 23/28 82%; 12/14 85% Titan- fairly close.What she ignores is that the Prius almost doubles the MPG of the similar sized/accel. Prizm(Corolla).
So her "They don't get EPA" is true, but misleading, since almost no cars get EPA city when driven by "average drivers." Check CR for example-they got a miserable 35 mpg with the Prius in their city loop.However they also got 18 mpg with a 2006 Civic-AT-.Doubling the mpg of a Civic is spectacular, and exactly what the EPA test predicts 30 vs 60 becomes 18 vs 35-all but dead on!!
Her "they only last (on average)100,000 miles vs 300,000 for gas cars" is an outright lie of course.Has anyone here EVER seem/owned a gas car with 300,000 miles on it? I would bet that fewer tham 1/100 gas cars reach 300,000 miles-maybe more like 1/1000. My guess is that her "truth" behind this is the old claim that the hybrid batteries will last just 100,000 miles. No proof of this anywhere. Besides, how many gas only cars last 300,000 miles without a very expensive(transmission comes to mind as most likely) $3000 repair? None!!
Yes, this is typical "Swift Boating." Mix a little truth(don't get EPA) with outright lies (100,000 vs 300,000 and the Prius vs Hummer BS-another obvious lie-it doesn't take a lot of energy to produce computer chips or 90 lbs batteries-nothing like the 10,000 gallons a Hummer uses over 100,000 miles)
The" Toyota doesn't make $$ selling them" isn't my problem.Worse case,it is a smart PR move .I don't see Toyota losing $$ because of them? Toyota might not have expected to make $$ on them, but building them keeps their CAFE numbers up, so they feel free to build lots of high margin big vehicles. There are lots of ways to "make money" on something. I have to admit, the Prius sure seems like it is more than $4000 "better" than a Corolla or a Matrix.
I doubt Toyota foresaw $3/gas in 2005.They probably didn't expect to sell as many Prius this early.Heck, they didn't sell that many of the earlier model.Gasoline was $1.30/gal pre 9-11-2001. The run up has been due to the war in Iraq-fear premium. At $3/gal the Prius reaches breakeven against a $5000 cheaper Corolla/Civic at under 100,000 miles.Much sooner against everything else(excluding a HCH 2-it probably reaches breakeven miles sooner than a Prius, since it cost $2000 less).
A little "true" truth, mixed with outright unsupported lies. Not sure about the motivation(sour grapes, guilt?).Thanks.Charlie