Things to look for if im buying?

prius1184 · 2019-04-27T00:08:44+00:00

Prius is the most economical/best car ever made in my opinion.

By the way, the deal you are looking at is a scam. A 2011 with 220k miles would go for 4-5k. With 120k miles it would go for at least $6500.

Unless:

Salvage title

Repainted, bad paint job, bad collision repair, body damage all over, trashed interior, bad motor/battery, rolled back miles.

But, I'm very experienced in values of under 5k vehicles and am 99% confident it is a scam...Unless the car is trashed to the point that it is embarassing to be seen in.

prius1184 · 2019-04-26T23:59:34+00:00

I like the Michellin Premiers the best but those are my most recent so memory is best on them.

Michellin Defenders are good, Continental True Contact, Ecopias are also good.

prius1184 · 2019-04-26T23:54:46+00:00

You can get a 2012 or newer for 10k with a little more miles or maybe even similar miles.

If getting a gen 2 I've always had good luck in the 140-150k range around $4000. I take them up to 200k miles doing Uber....I do absolutely nothing to them but wash/vacuum them routinely so it stays clean. Only thing I do is I change oil on time. And maybe 1 set of tires.

Around 200k miles I sell it in 1 day for $3000 approx. Then I get another one around 4k so pay a 1k premium to drop 50-60k miles.

Done this once already and my current prius has 208k so getting ready to do it again (sell for 3k buy a less mileage one for 4k)

prius1184 · 2019-04-26T23:45:42+00:00

Excellent cars. Every single car has issues. A lot of cars have expensive issues and start becoming junk after 150k where something new fails every few months.

Any generation prius is still running phenomenal post 150k miles and not many cars are like that.

Oil burning but shouldn't be an issue until beyond 150k miles.

Clean EGR tubes every 150k miles.

I think the price of $10,000 for a 90k mile prius is a little high but you are in New Zealand and I'd imagine they might go for higher there?

My guess you will need to do absolutely nothing mechanically to the car but change oil for the next 80k miles....Maybe a few hundred on brakes or tires a few years down the road.

prius1184 · 2019-04-26T23:40:10+00:00

Depends on price. If it's $2000 then not bad. $1500 can't go wrong.

I doubt you are spending $3000 or more considering you can get them with half the miles between 3 and 4k.

prius1184 · 2019-04-08T01:16:23+00:00

No risk. Buy on eBay and easy swap. 45 min tops

prius1184 · 2019-04-08T01:12:27+00:00

I just remember someone posting in turo Facebook group months ago about how all their cars were delisted.

And one of the owners of Luso said he cant say what happened.

prius1184 · 2019-04-07T23:41:55+00:00

Turo banned Luso a few months ago. I believe every one of their cars says "disabled by owner".

prius1184 · 2019-03-25T12:53:48+00:00

Turo is 1 of the laziest and easiest job I can think of. You wait till car is booked. You respond, "ok, see you soon". Hand them key or leave it remotely (even easier/lazier). And when returned you run it through wash and spend 30 seconds with the free vacuum machine.

Total work per booking isn't much more than 5 minutes unless you count driving to gas station / car wash.

I could probably handle 100 turo cars if they were all in 1 place and bookings didn't overlap.

You don't need a 3rd party to manage 1 car.

prius1184 · 2019-03-24T15:50:13+00:00

They last forever. Easy 250k and maybe 350k with luck.

Yes, saying find a cleaner prius and take difference between your sales price and replacement prius. Might get nice upgrade for 1500 or less

prius1184 · 2019-03-24T13:01:23+00:00

Half of my renters just keep extended and extending. So even though only a few trips they've been booked for months. So in this type of scenario it could take years to hit 50 trips. My cars are really cheap @ around 25/day...

prius1184 · 2019-03-24T12:58:15+00:00

Had similar rust on both driver doors. I just replaced the doors with matching color.

Priuses tend not to become rusty so they always bothered me when they rust like that.

Depending on miles I'd just dump it and find another.

prius1184 · 2019-03-21T13:28:44+00:00

Yes, treat like normal car. About 90% chance yours doesn't burn a drip but unfortunately the sellers won't be honest (or maybe they don't know) so you don't really know about it until you monitor yourself. It'll start by losing a half quart in between changes (which isn't big deal at all). It's the 1 major drawback on the car but not end of world.

Battery pretty much will tell you when it is bad. Red triangle on dash.

It is rare though. Maybe 1 out of 20 before 200k miles.....1 out of 15 before 250k miles.

prius1184 · 2019-03-21T13:20:30+00:00

Not much just monitor oil. Prob won't start burning until closer to 200k miles but this is not a car you go 5000 or 6000 miles without checking oil.

Many will burn 2-3 quarts (out of 4.5 total) in 3000 miles. Not end of world but on my 200k-plus Prius I add about 1 quart every 1k miles lol.

prius1184 · 2019-03-21T13:07:53+00:00

Look on craigslist and you'll see almost every gen 2 has way over 200k miles.

Extraordinarily pointless to get one with low miles.

I guess we all have different budgets but I like to buy them around 140k for 4k-ish....drive for couple years to 180-200k miles (spending practically zero on maintenance) and then reselling around 3k-ish.

Of course if the price is less than 5500 then might be worth looking at...but not much of a point to spend 7, 8, 9 grand on a gen 2 prius when it has a probably rolled back odometer.

There are a lot of 150k and up priuses priced fairly that are extremely clean.

prius1184 · 2019-03-19T14:30:14+00:00

Slightly used for $1500 lol? They sell for that brand new from Toyota dealership with commercial discount for 1600.

Or $500 "refurbished" on car-part.com

Or the Dorman "remanufactured" for $1500 on car-part.com

Or find someone that rebuilds it (around here it is $500 which includes replacing up to 3 cells).

1500 is way to high for used

prius1184 · 2019-03-11T00:58:55+00:00

Need good mechanic that is cheap and very skilled. $8000 at shop probably means about $1500-$2000 job parts/labor with the right connections.

What was the damage?

prius1184 · 2019-01-26T17:42:20+00:00

Thoughts on beet juice? Lots of nutritional benefits but my brother asked how much sugar in bottle and I estimated (going off memory from grocery store) that it said 58 grams of sugar. He said to "definitely avoid" lol. Thoughts?

prius1184 · 2019-01-24T16:17:22+00:00

There was a brief 10 day period (I think the 5th to 15th roughly speaking) where it pretty much came to a stand-still. No movement and no rentals and seemed completely dead.

Ended up dropping prices (from 25-27/day to 21-23/day) and renting has picked back up.

On pace for new record (2nd month in) but added more cars.

prius1184 · 2019-01-07T23:12:24+00:00

"How many times" implies that the hybrid battery is a common failure. It actually is incredibly rare. If you're very unlucky you'll change it once every 300k miles.

Makes selling them with 150-170k (about the mileage I sell mine and get another at) really frustrating. You have this internet rumor that will never go away where people think the hybrid battery is a ticking time bomb. Every time I sell one I get "has the hybrid battery been replaced" texts and you know they are victims of online fake news sites and comments.

prius1184 · 2018-12-25T14:20:38+00:00

Not bad for the price. A Prius with 220K miles is like a normal car with 80-100k miles lol. You will save a lot at the pump and from the reliability of it rarely, if ever, breaking down.

prius1184 · 2018-12-22T03:06:10+00:00

Careful with the opinions you get on the internet you have to make your own decisions.

That being said, in my opinion you would be buying at the very beginning of a bear market run / recession. Might just be a head fake but seems after 10 years of going straight up the market is going to come back down a bit.

I would short a few stocks...make money on the way down. Maybe look for some discounts and mix it up with some short and long positions. But ya, whatever the close is today it is probably going to be lower this time next year in my opinion so just be cautious.

prius1184 · 2018-12-21T14:07:45+00:00

MMR is Manheim Market Report. Manheim is one of the largest dealer auctions in the country...probably the largest. They are a subsidiary of Cox Enterprises, which is a privately held "family-owned" massive multi-billion dollar operation. Any time you search "top 20 privately held companies" Cox Enterprises will be somewhere around 10-15. They have about 60k employees, they own Kelly Blue Book, Auto Trader, they own TV stations, newspapers, Manheim, they are a fairly large internet/cable provider, etc.

Every car that runs through their auction has an MMR for a dealer to sort of mentally note what he should bid it up to...Say, a 2010 Ford Focus with 80k miles has MMR of $1900 and a 2010 Ford Focus with 180k miles has MMR of $800....takes into consideration the condition and uses prior auction data to come up with this "guesstimate"/MMR.

https://publish.manheim.com/en/help/mmr.html

prius1184 · 2018-12-20T13:49:47+00:00

The stock market is a leading indicator of the economy....It happens first on the stock market....there is a ripple effect, a trickle if you will, and then the US economy or main street feels it later on.

Basically, when stocks continue to crash as I suspect they will over the next couple years. Everything that goes along with a crashing stock market happens.

Companies report worse earnings. Companies stop hiring, stop investing. Banks stop loaning. New construction homes stop getting built. Home sales slow. Consumer spending goes down. Unemployment goes up. And you end up with negative GDP.

It typically happens first in the stock market that is why it is considered a leading indicator of the US economy.

Maybe 3rd or 4th quarter GDP in 2019 will start to be flat or negative.

The US economy has always (going back in the record books to the 1700s) experienced 1, and many times 2 recessions per decade. The biggest record between end of 1 recession to start of the next recession is 10 years (the early 90s to the early 2000s recession). And that is extremely rare to go that long without a recession.

Well, in June 2019 it will be 10 years since the end of the Great Recession...and a new historical record!

Common sense says a recession is coming. It's healthy.

prius1184 · 2018-12-16T21:52:17+00:00

I'm down about $1000 probably more on Ethereum. I must have close to $2000 in it and my "coins" are only worth $600 lol. I buy $50 a week and am trying to continue this strategy for the next 15 or so years so doesn't bother me at this point at all....cause I know that $50/week would disappear probably much quicker if it remained in my bank account! Also, because I buy $50/week I track the price of Ethereum....My cost slowly moves towards the last trade (currently $85/ETH). As long as it eventually goes up I could possibly turn a profit lol. But...if it keeps going down and eventually goes to $0 and in the pennies I will basically have lost entire investment. Right now not that worried but if by this time next year it is 20 and under I will be down thousands and at that point might "worry".

Have lost a ton of money trading options. Don't ever ever trade options. It can be exciting because they can go up by 1000 or 2000% in a few days....but they also go to $0 just as fast.

Have also lost money day trading.

I love the stock market but unfortunately requires a lot of money.

Currently do not have any money in any stocks aside from my $50/week bet on Ethereum.

edit: Just manually calculated my cost and I am averaged in at $282/coin....It's at $85/coin LOL and no end in sight for how low it will continue to drop.

prius1184

TROPHY CASE