2000 Miles

Back in January, my car started experiencing some problems. It was a 2006 Toyota Prius that I got when I got my first teaching job. The big red master alert came on and the car lost power while on the interstate. I managed to coast into a gas station. Restarting proved effective and I made it home after a nerve-wracking drive. No one wants to get stranded on the east side of 610 after 9pm on a Sunday.

Taking it to the dealership the next day revealed some part that needed replacing. That would cost $5000. Uhh. No one wants to put $5000 into a 12year old car. I did some digging and found some posts on the interwebs that suggested I might be able to replace the part myself with for a mere $500.

I seriously considered this but it didn’t look like a particularly easy thing to accomplish. One of those things that would either prove surprisingly straightforward and simple or would degenerate into a complete cluster-fuck. With a $500 minimum buy-in.

I didn’t want to get a new car. Sure, something new is always cool. But I would have much rather try to make it to 15 or 20years on the Prius and get something with at least basic self-driving capabilities. But I wasn’t comfortable with doing the repair myself, nor was my wife, and I didn’t want to pay $5000 to drive the same old car.

So I started looking for new cars. If I had been smart, I would have found some slightly used car that wasn’t much more than the repair cost would have been. But I take after my Dad. He always liked getting new cars. I’ve resisted better than him, having only ever bought the one (though, most cars he bought where when he was older than I am and could better afford it, so it’s not a great comparison). But I still felt the Syren’s call.

I had originally gotten the Prius because, in 2006, it was the most environmentally conscious choice. If I was going to get something new, I wanted to make the next step and go with a true electric vehicle. Unfortunately, those can be quite expensive and the infrastructure isn’t quite there for it yet.

I briefly considered a Tesla but didn’t want to wait a year for a Tesla 3 that might be in my price range if I got the barebones kind. I wasn’t a fan of the interiors of the current model Prius’. But then I remembered a friend of mine telling me about his new car, the Honda Clarity.

Not a true electric vehicle, it does have a gas engine, it is pretty close. With a 50ish mile battery range it has more than enough juice for most driving that I do. I can make it to downtown Houston and back on a charge. As for near home, I can go two to three days on a single charge when just taking the kid to school and grocery store trips.

So if this happened in January, why am I writing about it now? Well, I last bought gas April 11th so it has been five months between fills up. In that time I have traveled over 2,000 miles on battery. So I’m bragging.  Fight me.

I could calculate how much its cost in electricity cost but it hasn’t been noticeable so I haven’t bothered. I can say it would have cost an additional $187.82 to buy gas for the Prius in this time. And over $700 if I had a gas guzzling SUV.

And before you say, “I’m just transferring the CO2 emissions from the car to the power plant”, one of the nice things about Texas is you can pick your electrical company. And ours uses only wind and solar. Assuming that that’s actually true there’s no gain in CO2 emissions from plugging it in.

So yeah I can feel slightly better about driving. Plus, there have been a lot of new features added to cars since 2006. The Prius was the basic model and while Clarity isn’t the fancy upgraded version either, it is nice to have Bluetooth and USB ports. I can listen to audiobooks/podcasts without having to use an FM transmitter. Yay!