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MY WIFE AND I BOUGHT a used hybrid Toyota RAV4 recently. We saw it at a dealership and bought it that day.
This wasn’t an impulse purchase. We knew it was time to replace my 10-year-old Subaru Forester, and we’d done research on hybrids and electric vehicles. Because the new car would be our distance traveling vehicle, and my occasional work transportation, we wanted the flexibility of a hybrid. In time, we’ll replace our second car with an electric vehicle for local driving.
This purchase was part of the decision we made years ago to shrink our energy and other natural resource “footprint.” Our home is heated and cooled with a geo-thermal system, our electricity comes from a solar farm in our area, and we compost and recycle. Trading in our gas-burning cars is just the next step.
We found that the internet has transformed car buying. We’d expected the dealership’s salespeople to interview us and then suggest cars for us to look at, trying to sell us a vehicle from the stock they had on hand. That had been our experience in the past—but that’s not what we found.
We visited two dealerships. At the first, a laid-back fellow referred us to online resources, and said we could have a car shipped to the dealership if we found one we wanted—with no transport fee if we bought the vehicle. So diffident was our guy, in fact, that he seemed almost uninterested in making a sale.
We were bewildered and a bit uncomfortable with this approach. Could we find an informed salesperson who would at least walk us through the dealer’s car lot and then, if necessary, guide us through the first rounds of an online search, all without trying to close a sale immediately?
We had a better experience at the second dealership we visited. The salesman asked why we were thinking about a used RAV4. He thought our reasoning was sound, but told us that not many such vehicles were available. In fact, the only one on the lot was a 2021 model that had arrived the day before. He said if we didn’t buy it immediately, someone else would snap it up.
We thought that might be classic arm-twisting. But in fact, there was a couple on the lot looking at the same car we were interested in. As they say in Chicago, you snooze, you lose. We claimed it.
We found there are some positive developments in car sales. Most obvious to us was the number of women selling cars. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just over 20% of auto salespeople are women, a substantial increase in recent years. Women selling vehicles is good for customers and great for dealers because many buyers are put off by the car industry’s historically aggressive male-dominated sales culture.
Another improvement is a more streamlined purchase procedure. I was dreading the visit to “the money guy” who would subtly nudge us to finance the purchase with a modest down payment, sweetening the offer by discovering little discounts or reconfigurations of the warranties, while still ultimately making good money for the company by signing us to a significant loan at a relatively high interest rate.
We were not going that route. When my wife and I shop for big ticket items, we act as a bit of a tag team. With the salesperson, I take the role of the idiot who needs to have all kinds of things explained. That helps with the dismissive “don’t worry your pretty little head” attitude toward women, which is still all too pervasive. I push for and get explanations and details.
Meanwhile, my wife is the hard bargainer. “I don’t need or want this or this,” said firmly. Then, with a hint of skepticism, “Is that the best you can do?” She gets results that my marshmallow self can only admire—in this case, a 20% larger trade-in allowance on my road-weary Forester, a 20% increase in warranty coverages, and some other little goodies. Yay, team.
We chose to get all the optional warranty coverages for the “new to us” car. Although it’s less than three years old, we’re the third owners of this vehicle, and we don’t want to worry about the cost of repairs, replacement parts and upkeep. Since we’ll drive this car for years, the money we paid for these coverages should amortize well. At a minimum, we’ll sleep better.
When the actual purchase moment arrived, we weren’t hustled over to a separate loan person in a side office. Our salesperson asked how we wanted to pay for the vehicle. We said cash. He said fine, and handed us off to the title, registration and warranty person, who casually punched in a quick query to one of the credit rating companies. She was ready to accept our personal check for the full amount before we’d gotten our checkbook out. The possibility of financing never came up.
So, we drove off in a Toyota that’s all ours. Since then, we’ve put a few thousand miles on it, and used one of the warranty policies to cover the ridiculously high cost of a second key fob. The best part: We’re happily not buying gas every week.
Tom Scott is a retired Episcopal priest. He and his wife live in Evanston, Illinois. They love retirement because they get to see more of their children and grandchildren, and they can spend more time at concerts, the opera and the Chicago Botanic Garden. Tom’s previous articles were Forever Calling and Starting Late.
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My most recent impulsive purchase occurred in 2011 when I decided to buy a BMW 328i to celebrate a job promotion I had just received.
Since 2021, I’ve mainly used my Tesla Model Y due to the advantages it offers, such as free charging at work, affordable nighttime electricity rates, and a convenient supercharger network that eliminates range anxiety. Over the past two years, the only maintenance required for my Tesla was refilling the windshield wiper fluid.
While I understand that many people may not be able to afford a fully electric car, increasing the number of hybrid vehicles on the road can still help reduce overall emissions, despite the complexity and ongoing maintenance costs associated with these vehicles.
However, the most effective way to address transportation emissions is to invest in public transportation networks for both large and small cities, as well as regional rail connections. Unfortunately, this idea is often met with immediate criticism by a gaggle of interests.
We bought both of our current vehicles from the same dealership and the same salesperson, one in 2018 and one in 2020. In both cases, we did some Internet research to narrow things down and then went to local dealerships to test drive the car(s) we were interested in. And in both cases, the model/color we wanted were hard to find.
No problem, our guy told us. He found the first car at a dealer about 400 miles south of us. There were only two models that color in the entire state of California when he started making calls—the first one got snapped up before he could grab it, and the second was the one he got for us. I talked to him on Friday afternoon before Labor Day weekend, and by Tuesday morning, he’d texted me a photo with “come get your car.” He had to get the second car from Oregon, and it took a few days longer, maybe a week.
He calls and emails both of us on our birthdays every year and sends holiday greetings. He’s good at his job and made it easy for us.
With a Toyota hybrid, there really is no need to go full electric. Total operating emissions for a gas only hybrid drop by so much compared to a non hybrid that going full EV is no longer a significant improvement. Specific vehicle data including upstream GHG emissions can be found on Fueleconomy.gov. If really concerned, a plug-in hybrid can actually have lower lifecycle emissions than a full EV, due to the much smaller (and cheaper) battery.
Also, “carbon footprint” was invented by British Petroleum (BP) to make people believe that individuals are equally responsible for climate change, when in reality the vast majority of emissions come from companies, not individuals. The climate footprint of an individual person over their entire lifetime is equal to about 1 second of global climate emissions. So for example, if we reach 2.5C of warming in 30 years, if one individual had a zero climate footprint from birth to death (unlikely), we would still reach 2.5C, but it would take 30 years and 1 second. Hardly worth mentioning, and yet the marketing of BP has successful shifted the conversation, so that now people actually look at themselves as the problem, instead of looking at companies like BP as the problem. Americans are said to have higher emissions on average, but those emissions are spent for you (infrastructure, etc) not by you. Don’t fall for the lie, your individual climate footprint is basically zero, regardless of what you do.
Transportation emissions contribute significantly to the overall emissions and the auto industry R&D to improve mileage and emissions on their vehicles will definitely help.
See https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/energy-and-the-environment/images/CO2-spaghettichart-2022.pdf from the EIA.
In the Transport footnote of your link, it says “Also includes natural gas used to operate natural gas pipelines.” Funny the things they consider “transportation” emissions.
After five years owning a Tesla Model 3, we’ve found long-distance driving to be pretty smooth with the Supercharger network. There are definitely still gaps but the company seems to be working hard to fill those, while also upgrading older sites with newer, faster-charging units.
Toyota makes great hybrids. We enjoyed many years with ours, hope yours does too.
Are you at all concerned by the climate emissions, ecologically destructive strip mining, and slave labor, including child labor, that goes into constructing the massive battery required to make a full EV? Shouldn’t we be trying to use as little battery as possible given these issues? We could make 50 hybrids with the battery capacity required to make just 1 Tesla Model 3. That sounds like the opposite of conservation to me. The emissions from 1 gas-only vehicle and 1 Tesla Model 3, are equal to the emissions of 2 hybrids; so preferring hybrids seems obvious since they only need 1/50th of the batteries.
Since you’ve not provided any proof using dependable sources of all those wild assertions, I am not concerned.
Last I looked, my 2018 Model 3 battery cells were made by Panasonic in either the US or Japan using lithium sourced from countries which have reasonable labor standards. In 2022, Panasonic and Toyota announced a joint venture which is sourcing lithium carbonate for batteries from a US firm: Toyota-Panasonic battery JV to buy lithium from ioneer’s Nevada mine | Reuters.
You can also recycle the materials in EV batteries to make new batteries: Redwood Materials | Circular Supply Chain for Lithium-ion Batteries. CO2 sequestration is incredibly hard to do at scale, though some are trying (fortunately).
If you have a tailpipe on any vehicle, hybrid or not, your lifetime vehicle emissions will be higher than mine, counting fully from “well to wheel”. I have no beef with hybrids, they’re an affordable transition solution. We owned one for many years and loved it.
David, lithium makes up less than 3% of a lithium ion battery. Focusing your defense on one of the smallest components of the battery indicates a need for you to brush up on your knowledge about the materials being discussed. You should also realize that lithium recycling technologies, like almost all recycling technologies, yield a significantly degraded product. Nobody who is aware of the chemistry expects recycled battery materials to provide fully usable vehicle batteries. You may get one extra life cycle out of it, but then you’re done. That’s not called sustainability, that’s called kicking the can further down the road.
I don’t agree with your 3% figure. Yes, there’s also cobalt, graphite, nickel, etc depending on the particular manufacturer’s chemistry and cathode composition. There are also some rare earth metals in electric motors which need to scale.
Big technology shifts or ongoing demand for dwindling resources always drive a search for fresh sources of resources when it’s economically compelling to do so. We thought we had reached “peak oil” years ago, then hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling tech came along. Now the US produces more oil than Saudi Arabia. For cars, we can debate the shape of the EV adoption curve, but the transition will accelerate with new sources of needed materials discovered all along the way.
Hopefully continuing improvement in battery technology will make this a moot point.
“Concerns about lithium ion batteries may be short-lived, as battery technology is advancing quickly, and EV battery components may be very different in the near future. Companies are investing enormous resources in the development of new battery technologies, including solid state batteries, sodium ion, iron air and silicon anode and other materials. It is likely that one or more of these technologies will arrive on the market in the next decade. Toyota’s new solid state batteries could hit the market by 2027″.
Mike, your quote proves that everyone knowledgable about this knows that these batteries are unsustainable. People are trying to solve this problem, but so far, everything is either “maybe in the future we can recycle them” or “maybe we’ll figure out a sustainable process later.” But the climate crisis can’t be averted by hopes and dreams. If something is a bad idea based on the technology as it exists today, then the thing to do is stop using it, or at the very least limit use to the bare minimum. Otherwise, these batteries could end up in a similar position to coal, where the promise of future carbon capture technology allows people to blindly just keep burning more coal.
Your only 10 yr old Subaru needed replacing?! Ouch. I only recently had to get rid of my 30 yr old Volvo.
When I read this article I thought I wrote it. Our 10 year old Forrester’s dash is lit up like a Christmas tree, and the cost to repair is quoted as $2500, this it the third year in a row of >1K repair. I keep cars until “it’s time”, and it is.
Agree. 9 or 10 years old is usually when we acquire our vehicles, then drive them until the wheels fall off or the odometer breaks.
Although I have a completely different philosophy on buying cars (buy older, buy from individuals, etc.), I thoroughly enjoyed your story on your experience.
One tip for anyone trying to avoid the expense of a key Fob for a vehicle: many can be programmed easily at home using a Simple Key programmer, or most locksmiths can do it for slightly more money. (…but still much less than going to a dealership.)
As an example: I made 3 new key Fobs for a Jeep for about $100 for the programmer (came with 1 key/remote) and $16 for the other 2 keys on eBay. So, for less than $40/each total, I have 3 new key Fobs. A locksmith would likely charge around $80-$90/each and a dealership would likely charge around $200-$300 or more for each.
Tom, we had a similarly different “shopping” experience last spring. Ironically, it’s the desperate shortage of cars, especially used ones, that made the process more pleasant for us — all the dealerships near us had taken their salespeople off commission and put them on salary because it was the only way to keep them.
That eliminated the sales pressure. The sales folks we met were pleasantly relaxed, and therefore so were we. And because the used cars we wanted were so bizarrely overpriced, we wound up buying a new Venza hybrid (42mpg!) for the same price as the used one.
Glad you got your second key fob so quickly. We waited nearly seven months for ours.
Thanks for the update. It’s getting to where I need to replace my 2007 Camry hybrid, and although I think I did well on that purchase it wasn’t fun.
I love you and your wife’s tag team approach. I’m a huge fan of hybrids, a new battery in my wife’s Prius can be had for a reasonable sum. The cost of the much larger batteries in EV’s still scare me.