
Toyota’s Prius Pays Price for Cheap Gasoline - jseliger
http://www.wsj.com/articles/toyotas-prius-pays-price-for-cheap-gasoline-1473149470
======
SandersAK
For me, the issue is that intellectuals, futurists, etc constantly downplay
the crucial cultural role that cars play as part of our identity in America.

America has really shitty public transit, so on average, you're driving (or
being driven) somewhere and seeing other people driving.

America is also a place that encourages and celebrates individuality (for
better or worse). At the same time, it's a country of sub-cultures and mixed
cultural identities.

So you get people buying cars that they think fit their personal identity and
their sub culture.

Prius(i?) were a statement for the conscious movement, but it's damning that
Toyota never pushed the bar further and explored (until recently) other
cultural identity vehicles as eco-conscious (like Tacomas, imagine how awesome
that would be!).

tl;dr - cars are critical to American culture, and not just as practical tools
for moving around. Even if you think you buy a prius because you "don't care"
\- that unto itself is a cultural and style decision you are making to express
yourself. Hoodies forever.

side rant: Why Tesla is the only car company to make an electric (or even
hybrid) that doesn't look like vanilla boring practical dogshit is beyond me.

~~~
xenadu02
> America has really shitty public transit

And it wasn't an accident either. The car companies actively campaigned to
tear up and dismantle public transit.

Dallas used to have a huge streetcar network; all that remains is the M uptown
line.

Even here in San Francisco the anti-public-transit movement managed to tear
down the A and B lines (among others; The A line used to run down Geary to the
beach and the B line turned south and ran down 19th Ave.)

~~~
wizardforhire
Oklahoma City had an extensive electric street car network that was eventually
dismantled.

[http://www.acogok.org/transportation-planning/maps-and-
data/...](http://www.acogok.org/transportation-planning/maps-and-
data/historical-streetcar-routes/)

There are plans in the works to build a new light rail system. The trains were
just purchased earlier this year.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_Streetcar](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_Streetcar)

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maxsilver
Is it really Cheap Gasoline that's the cause of the decline?

Seems more like Toyota's Prius is paying the price for hanging onto a decade-
old product. The type of customer who would have bought a Prius in 2002, has
moved on to EV's and PHEV's, and Toyota doesn't appear to be selling those
yet.

Cheap Gasoline hasn't stopped Tesla from racking up multi-year-long waiting
lists for the Model 3. "CMAX Energ-i" and Volts and LEAFs can be bought today
at decent prices. But Toyota's response -- the "Prius Prime" \-- doesn't
appear to be for sale yet.

~~~
mikeash
Tesla's cars are awesome in just about every respect besides price. The Model
3 promises to preserve the awesomeness without the price tag. People want
them, and it rarely has anything to do with saving money on gas.

Priuses are kind of boring. (I owned one for a while so I hope I'm not too
clueless on this.) They work, they're reliable, they're cheap to run, but few
people come back from a Prius test drive thinking, holy shit, I'll do whatever
it takes to own one of these cars. Nobody warns prospective Prius buyers,
"don't test drive one unless you're ready to put down a bunch of money to buy
it, because you will want to."

If I had to buy a non-EV car again, I'd probably look at Priuses because
efficiency pleases me, Toyota has a good reputation, and their stuff is pretty
reliable, but it's not particularly compelling. For a lot of people, saving
money on gas is the main reason to even consider a Prius. It's not even in
most people's top 10 for a Model 3.

Note that with a whopping 22 miles of electric range, the Prius Prime is far
from a Model 3 competitor. Toyota seems to be betting on hydrogen rather than
batteries, for reasons I've yet to comprehend, so I'd say their Model 3
competitor is the Mirai. Although I don't know why anyone would ever buy a
Mirai.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>Priuses are kind of boring. (I owned one for a while so I hope I'm not too
clueless on this.) They work, they're reliable, they're cheap to run, but few
people come back from a Prius test drive thinking, holy shit, I'll do whatever
it takes to own one of these cars.

The bumper sticker on my roommate's Prius goes...

 _" Hey, cool Prius!" -Nobody_

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chmaynard
> “Toyota has put more energy into the mechanics of the [Prius] than the
> styling.”

I'm a happy Toyota hybrid customer. Styling was not an important consideration
when I chose the Prius. Gas mileage was much more important, along with price,
quality, and comfort.

~~~
Alupis
> Styling was not an important consideration when I chose the Prius. Gas
> mileage was much more important, along with price, quality, and comfort.

Yes, that may be. But imagine if there had been an alternative to the Prius -
was priced the same, had the same gas mileage and equivalent specs, but it
looked a lot more stylish/sporty/refined, etc...

Which do you buy now?

~~~
viraptor
The one that you like better. Which one "looked a lot more
stylish/sporty/refined" is not going to be the same for every person.

~~~
tw04
EVERY person? No. But the VAST majority of people think a McLaren P1 looks
extremely sexy and a Pontiac Aztec looks like a committee of idiots were in
charge of the exterior design.

The Prius is known for many things: I don't know of anyone who would go out of
their way to say it's a stylish or attractive looking car as one of it's top
20 attributes. I'm sure someone out there like that exists, but they are very
clearly in the minority.

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clivestaples
My Honda died at 300,000 miles in February. I used the occasion to explore
buying a pickup truck and discovered that gas prices had fallen and Toyota
Tacomas were selling at a record pace above MSRP. The Dodge Ecodiesel was
$40k. The Prius' were sitting the lot and the fleet manager said he'd make me
a killer deal. I drove it and enjoyed myself. The car was ~$20k, >50 mpg. I
fill up every two to three weeks in SoCal for about ~$20.

~~~
protomyth
What's the warranty like on Prius fleet cars?

~~~
clivestaples
I got the standard 3/36k with 60k drive train. I'm not sure I got a "fleet
deal", I just worked with him through Costco.

EDIT: I did get a significant discount that was available to pretty much
anyone who walked in to buy one. He told me there was considerable pressure to
move them because sales completely dried up. In retrospect, I probably could
have gotten a much better warranty :/ Oh well...

~~~
protomyth
Thanks. I drive quite a bit (about 45K a year, welcome to North Dakota) and
I'm thinking I need to replace my Kio Rio with something that will get 40+ mpg
(Rio gets 41 or 32 with a head wind and 50 with a tail wind). I haven't heard
anything bad about the Prius.

I was going to break down and buy a truck since it would be really useful, but
the Colorado really is poor.

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guelo
We are in desperate need of a carbon tax to continuously push the economy away
from global warming emissions. It's crazy that we let Saudi Arabia's oil whims
dictate our transportation policy.

~~~
sokoloff
Maybe. (FTR, I support carbon taxation on balance.)

Many carbon taxation implementations would amount to a regressive tax. Poor
people on average drive more and spend more of their income on gasoline than
the wealthy. Add in the fact that it becomes a hidden consumption tax as well
and it could end up being a fairly regressive tax.

Then the question becomes: are the ecological advantages worth the economic
harm from the regressive nature?

Since my wife buys about 200 gallons of gas per year, my daily driver is
electric, and our income is enough that we'd never notice a carbon tax, it's
easy for me to support it personally. That's far from true for many others.

~~~
Tiktaalik
You can mitigate the regressive nature of the tax by making the carbon tax
"revenue neutral" and funnelling the revenues of the tax completely into
credits and tax cuts for those most impacted, which includes low income
persons.

British Columbia's carbon tax is claimed to be revenue neutral though I've
noticed some criticism about the balance of resulting tax cuts.

Other carbon tax jurisdictions such as Alberta are taking a different approach
and are using revenues on green projects.

~~~
twblalock
Or, even better, you could use the money from the tax to build decent public
transit so fewer people need to drive to work. This would enable to poor to
avoid the tax by driving less.

If you don't build transit, people will have no choice but to drive just as
much as they did before the tax was implemented, so the tax will have a
minimal effect on vehicle emissions.

Sure, people will cut back on non-required trips, but the vast majority of
driving people do is commuting, and they can't stop doing that unless they
have an alternative means of getting to work.

~~~
sporkenfang
Exactly. I don't drive, because I don't have to, but the vast majority of
people I know live so far from their sources of income (and in some cases,
grocery stores etc.) that even taking public transit, if there are routes to
get them from A to B, would be laughable (i.e., 3 hours on five buses versus
an hour and 10 minutes in a car on one highway to go one direction).

~~~
twblalock
I've seen some divergent figures, but as far as I can tell, cars emissions are
20-30% of total US carbon emissions.

The only way to reduce driving significantly is to create useful public
transit, so any carbon tax scheme that does not increase funding for public
transit is just going to take money from peoples' pockets without giving them
a realistic way to avoid it -- and as other posters have noted, it will
disproportionately harm the poor. This could make carbon taxes so politically
unpopular that they will be repealed, and new ones will not be created. That
could be pretty bad for the environment.

------
cpprototypes
I don't understand why Toyota is not the leader in plugin hybrids. They had
such a big lead in hybrid tech and the next natural step was plugin hybrid.
Imagine a RAV4 or Highlander plugin hybrid with 50 mile range. The demand
would be incredible. The marketing would be so easy, "Drive your SUV to get
groceries with zero gas! Save money, help the environment, and drive a big
car! win-win-win for everyone!" A SUV like this would fit so well with the
suburban lifestyle in the US. Instead they are wasting time and money on the
hydrogen fuel-cell nonsense. How can their management have enough vision to
create the Prius and hybrid tech and yet so ignorant of this next obvious
step?

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anexprogrammer
"The entire market has dramatically shifted to light trucks and SUVs with gas
under $3 a gallon."

I did a double take at that as price per gallon seems markedly lower than when
I was last in the US.

UK prices ratchet seemingly inexorably upwards. When US prices peaked in 08 at
$4.50 we paid pretty much exactly what we pay now - £5 approx. Tax is around
65% of pump price, though it's been higher in the past.

I assume there's no US attempts to increase taxation to combat clmate change
and encourage alternative behaviour.

~~~
mikeash
Around here, prices are currently a little over $2/gallon, with occasional
stations showing slightly under $2.

Of course there's no attempt to increase taxes, because taxation is theft and
government is the enemy. The federal gas tax hasn't been increased since 1993,
and worse it's a fixed amount per _gallon_ , not a percentage, so both
inflation and increasing fuel efficiency cut into it. State gas taxes are a
little more mutable but still face lots of resistance.

~~~
anexprogrammer
Blimey. No surprise sales of hybrids aren't growing.

We had, under Blair, yearly percentage increases above inflation in fuel tax
as part of their climate change efforts. There was a point, I forget quite
where - perhaps around 99p a litre or £4.40 a gallon, where behaviour and car
use started to noticeably change.

~~~
mikeash
Yeah, it's kind of crazy.

When gas prices started to retreat from the $4/gallon peak around 2008, there
was talk of increasing gas taxes to compensate. Not just for climate change,
but also because efficiency is hitting gas tax revenue and that money is
needed to build and maintain roads. But it's a tough sell when half of the
electorate thinks climate change is a conspiracy and government always wastes
its money, so nothing happened.

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Yhippa
> “The people with money buy a Tesla,” he said.

The Prius looks like an old-man's car to me. Teslas have all the bells-and-
whistles and don't look half bad. Much easier to peacock in a Model S than
_any_ of the Prii.

~~~
sixothree
Toyota has made some awful design decisions in the last few years. I've owned
Toyota's most of my life. I'm on year 11 of my Camry and would like a new
Camry or Lexus. Instead I'm looking at other manufacturers.

~~~
r00fus
Hear, hear!

In mid-2000s Toyota was an innovator and disruptor (hybrids). Now they're busy
being disrupted by GM and Ford (Toyota has no production electrics) and, of
course, Tesla.

And the new Priuses don't look good. Everyone I talked to have said the same
thing. It's like they wanted to ensure it'd fail - because Toyo is now all-in
for fuel-cells.

