So my husband and I recently got an offer we couldn't refuse to buy out 2009 Toyota Corolla. With a new baby, I was thinking maybe it'd be nice to have a slightly larger car to fit all related baby gear and who knows in the future maybe there will be another baby and more stuff. Well, we looked at cars that were supposedly bigger, like a Camry for example. Except that the Camry just had more legroom, but less space in the trunk. That's a bummer. The Honda Fit supposedly had tons of storage - we could definitely fit more in our Corolla. So the only thing that would work would be a small SUV like a Rav4 or CR-V, but I just couldn't bring myself to 1) up the price of the car and 2) have to get a car with low gas mileage and I'll be stuck paying a ton on gas. So we almost settled on just getting a new Corolla since it was the only car that looked like it might meet our needs.
Then along came the Prius v - a hatchback station wagon with lots of storage but also gets great gas mileage - especially in the city where we do most of our driving. Somehow I was convinced to go along with a new car with such a hefty, by my standards, price-tag. I'm a little worried about spending so much initially because I don't know that gas savings will make up for it. According to fueleconomy.gov, annual fuel cost for a Prius v is $1,350 and $1,900 for the Corolla. So that's only $550 - so for a car that's $9,000 more expensive that would take 16 years to make it up - so basically gas doesn't make up for it. But I guess we're paying premium for space and comfort.
Those are just estimates though, and based on doing 45% highway driving whereas we do much less than that - and that will make a bigger difference since unlike regular gas cars, the Prius gets better mileage for city driving. I'm curious to see the difference in our monthly gas budget - we;ll gt an official answer after driving it all month in September.
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