H, bug, and I spent the weekend visiting my Mom in FL. For ground transport, we rented a Toyota Prius. I thought it was a good idea to save gas and it might be neat. We didn't save much money because a Prius costs more to rent than a car of similar size, but we did save on gas.
For two days the rental fee, with Budget, was $244. That included the $56 dollars in extra insurance I got suckered into. For roughly 200 miles of driving we used about 4.5 gallons of gas which was running around $3.80. We averaged 40+ mpg. The most similar car on offer at Budget was a Nissan Sentra which gets around 30 mpg. A bit of quick math: the Prius cost us $19 in gas, the Sentra would have cost us $26 in gas, the rental price difference was about $20. We didn't save any money, but it was close. If we had done more driving, or used the climate control less, we would have saved.
As for the neat factor, it wore off pretty quickly. The Pruis drives like any other gas sipping compact car. It accelerates smoothly, but not quickly. It handles fine. It is a pretty boring car to drive.
The one area where I found it truly lacking was the feedback it provides to the driver. The dashboard offers a plethora of information, but I found more distracting than informative. The car's blinds spots are gigantic and visibility out the back window is terrible. Our car lacked the rear camera, which should be standard equipment. The accelerator and steering are dead and provide no feedback at all. The one piece of feedback that was noticeable was the wind noise at highway speed.
As a city/light commuting car, the Prius is likely an excellent car. If you want some fun in your ride, or spend a lot of time on the highway, I'd go for something different. Hopefully someone will make a fun, affordable, efficient car.
After getting back into H's Forester, I realized that I really didn't like driving the Prius.
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