There are thousands of used Toyota Prius hybrid cars on the used market today. As high-tech as the Prius is, you do have to realize that it’s been around for 12 years now. Maybe the Honda Insight was the first car to market that brought hybrid technology to the masses at an affordable price. But the Prius deserves credit for being the car that changed the way people thought about hybrid electric drivetrains. And it was the car that made fuel conservation cool.
And that’s no mean feat for a car brand to achieve – to come to America at the height of the Hummer-Escalade obsession and to make fuel conservation cool! Well, if you really want to be a friend to the environment (and not just polite to it as the other Prius buyers are), you have to realize that buying a used Toyota Prius is way better than buying new. How so, you ask?
Consider how much manufacturing effort goes into the making of a Prius. The batteries on the Prius are a special variety that are made out of a heavy metal called Nickel. Nickel is not mined through an environmentally-friendly process. For the Prius, nickel comes from a huge mine in Ontario, Canada. The 1000 tons that Toyota manages to mine from this place is quite destructive to the surrounding environment. But it doesn’t end there.
The nickel ore that is mined here is shipped off first to Europe for the refining process and then to China for further processing.
It then arrives in Japan where it is finally manufactured into batteries and installed in Prius cars (that are actually manufactured in Japan from parts all over the world). You can imagine how much environmental pollution all of this shipping around takes.
And then of course, there is the matter of what to do with all those batteries once they are all used up after eight years. What all of this means is this: it is an admirable thing to choose a hybrid car – especially one that is as well-made as the Prius. But the green-ness of the Prius does come at a price to the environment. If you want to be even more friendly to the environment, you really need to choose a used Toyota Prius instead of the latest and greatest one.
The best way to help the environment is to make the most use of what has been manufactured already.
If you should be convinced after reading all of this that buying a used Toyota Prius would really make environmental sense for someone who’s a friend of the environment, it really would be a good idea to not actually make a buying decision until you actually gather information about and learn about how the whole Prius system works. This way, you would be a good position to make a wise, well-informed buying decision that can serve you well for years.
Understanding how the Prius works
Every Prius that’s ever been manufactured, works on the same essential principle – that of the Toyota hybrid drivetrain. As you are probably aware, this is a dual propulsion system – there is the regular gasoline engine, and there are two electric motors (that function through a planetary gearbox) to bring power to the wheels. For as long as you’re driving under 25 mph, the electric motor does all the work. The gasoline engine is not called on to do anything at all because at those low speeds, gasoline engines are inefficient.
The moment you cross 25 mph though, the computers onboard the Prius will call on the gasoline engine to begin to contribute something. The Prius, with help from its computers, uses something called a Continuously Variable Transmission to determine what proportion of the work at hand each power source will undertake to contribute. If the gasoline engine is working, but most of its power is unused because you’re driving only at 30 mph or so, the surplus is used to charge the battery pack up. The Prius is so efficient because it wastes very little.
In stop-and-go traffic, even your braking is used to drive a generator to charge the batteries up (but only when you brake gently). Depress the brake pedal gently, and the car realizes that you’re not in a hurry to stop. Instead of pressing caliper to disc, it presses the generator into service.
How trouble-free is your used Prius ownership going to be?
There have been three generations of Prius cars so far. Every generation of this car is so popular to this day is that Toyota’s service garages and independent garages both offer robust support and service. There is so much interest in every generation of the Prius that there are even independent garages that will convert your regular used Toyota Prius into a plug-in hybrid. You’ll also find that there is a great deal of information to be had at every online forum and all the owners’ clubs that you’ll find in every city in America. Basically, your ownership experience of a used Toyota Prius is going to be trouble-free.
The Battery Pack
You’re wondering how this might be though. You do remember having heard stories every now and then about how the battery pack on the Prius can be its Achilles heel – failing after three or four years. But this is simply not true most of the time. To begin with, Toyota has a vigorous eight-year 100,000-mile guarantee on the that battery pack (it’s 10 years in California) and then, there are tens of thousands of Prius hybrids on the roads now that have done even longer than that and have no problems. If you’re really worried about this though, you really should read our guide on the Toyota Prius battery pack that explains everything. It should help clear everything right up.
Look up EVDriven for lots of fresh information on the Prius.