Car Chat

My wife and I currently have two wonderful cars that precisely fit our needs.

The newer is the one that I drive. It is a comically-small car, called a Scion IQ. It has a slightly offset seating arrangement that makes it impractical for more than three persons. There are two back seats, but the one behind the driver has no leg space at all. I kid could squeeze in, but not for a long ride.

This doesn't matter, as the back seats were folded away the day we got the car home, and they haven't been out since. I've only ever had one passenger.

It is my zip around car, and the one I take on the half-hour drive to Jiu-Jitsu. It has plenty of room for that kind of thing, and is ridiculously economical on gas.

It is currently 4 years old.

The one Helen drives is normal-sized. It is a Toyota Prius. It is even more economical than my tiny Scion.

It's the one we use for grocery runs, and Helen regularly hauls around tons of musical instruments and friends.

It is 8 years old.

Helen likes to run cars until they die of old age. I prefer getting rid of them at the ten-year mark, before they become big-ticket-repair prone, and might let you down at an inopportune moment.

This means we will need to think about replacing the Prius in 2 years.

There is really not much question as to what kind of car we'll get. We both love our current Prius so much, that it will be a Prius again. The question is, what size of Prius.

Toyota currently makes the standard model, a slightly-larger one, and a littler one as well.

We've looked at them all, and neither of us thinks we need the large model. That narrows the field to 2 choices.

We really like our full-sized model. We often travel with it pretty much fully packed. The standard has 21.6 cubic feet of cargo room, as opposed to 17.1 cubic feet in the small model. The price difference is $26000 against $22000.

This all means that unless things change radically in the next couple of years, our 2018 new car will be a Prius, standard-sized.

The Scion won't be up for replacement until 4 years after that, in 2022.

That's really far enough away that predictions are much harder to make.

I would guess that we'll be looking closely at a small-model Prius, but electric cars are popping out all over.

By 2022, it may be possible to get some sort of vehicle that functions well in a self-driving fashion, or at least has features that lean that way; lane assist, radar cruise control, and who knows what else.

I find it funny that a lot of people dread the arrival of self-driving cars. For me, they can't get here soon enough.