^[1] It wasn’t a fast car. Certainly not luxurious. Unique among car designs and immediately recognizable, but also completely unremarkable because it was so common. Most automotive enthusiasts seemed to find it unattractive. But they weren’t the target market.

It’s rare to see a product in any segment where engineers are able to blatantly optimize a single variable at the expense of several others, without being reeled back in and compromising on their vision in a trade space. The car will get better fuel economy than any existing gas-powered vehicle, but it’s ugly, slow, and is only a 2 seater. Okay, that was actually the first generation Honda Insight, which beat the Toyota Prius to the US market by seven months and launched in December 1999.

Prius was visibly less eccentric compared to the Insight, which had wheel well covers over the rear wheels to further reduce drag. Prius was also a bigger, heavier vehicle with four seats, more cargo room, and better crash ratings, all of which provided an advantage in the American market. The Insight’s engine was an electric motor assisted always-on gas engine, whereas the Prius could actually shut its gasoline engine off entirely and drive around solely under the power of its quiet electric motor at low speeds, which was a much cooler engineering trick. Despite being second to market and having worse fuel economy, the Prius repeatedly crushed the Insight in sales to the point that Honda discontinued the Insight in 2006, revived the model in 2010, discontinued it in 2014, redesigned it yet again for 2019 then pulled the plug again in 2022.

Back in 2015 I was driving about 35,000 miles per year and there were far less hybrids in the market than today. Prius had the market longevity, demonstrated reliability and best fuel economy so that’s what I went with. Since then my Prius logged 190,000 miles, carried me to the corners of every New England state, never failed to start when I wanted it to, and asked for no maintenance beyond fluid changes and replacing basic wear items. I will forever nerd out over the regenerative braking technology of hybrid and electric vehicles: the original set of brake pads on my Prius lasted 158,214 miles.

Unfortunately my Prius will never roll over 200,000 miles on the odometer. Recently I was rear-ended by an elderly woman who probably shouldn’t have been on the road. She slammed into me going about 35–40 MPH while I was stopped at a crosswalk waiting for a woman with a stroller to cross the street. Luckily my car didn’t move too much from the impact and no pedestrians were injured.

I figured my car had frame damage since the rear door wouldn’t open no matter how hard I pulled on it, which I guessed would total it due to the age and mileage. It took my insurance over a month to figure that out though. The repair estimate kept getting revised and climbing: $2,600, then $7,000, then $13,000 before they finally decided my Prius was totaled.

An irritating quirk of most car insurance policies I have learned is that totaled vehicles are paid out as “Actual Cash Value” which isn’t necessarily equivalent to the replacement cost. There was zero chance that the payout I received would purchase a used Prius in as good a condition as I kept mine, with meticulous maintenance records. And you can absolutely forget about the unrealized savings from continuing to drive your paid-off car around for several more years, because this just isn’t something car insurance covers or cares about. Ironically enough about a week before the accident my wife and I were discussing how I should get at least three more trouble-free years out of my Prius. Sometimes life does not go as planned.

After getting hit, I thought a lot about the vehicular arms race out there on the roads, with seemingly so many people buying SUVs and pickup trucks, especially in New England. Intuitively one would think sedans are at a disadvantage in crashes with larger vehicles, but just how much? Research led by Jehle Dietrich from the University of Buffalo analyzing a database of over 80,000 vehicles involved in head-on crashes found that when a sedan and an SUV have a head-on collision, on average the odds of death are 7.64 times higher for the sedan driver. Even in cases where the sedan involved has a higher crash test rating than the SUV involved, the odds of death for the sedan driver are 4.52 times higher. But flip that to giving the SUV the superior crash test rating, and the sedan driver is nearly ten times more likely to die in a head-on collision!^[2]

Those are some staggering and sobering figures. And looking at the data definitely pushed me towards wanting a bigger vehicle of my own, given that I’m not going to single-handedly change car culture, and can’t control what others are purchasing or doing on the road. I ended up buying a RAV4 Hybrid. I keep thinking of it as a taller, bloated Prius, given that all of Toyota’s hybrids are getting the same technology they developed with the Prius. The hybridization of other models, moderate gas prices, and desire for larger vehicles has certainly eaten into Prius sales. In the US, Toyota has only been selling about 20% as many 5th generation Priuses as they sold on an annual basis from 2007–2015.^[3]

At the end of the day, it’s just a car. They’re consumable items over any long period of time, especially living in an area with road salt. But I suspect everyone has a similar attachment and fond memories of the first car they bought new, paid off, and got many years of dedicated service out of.

I’m finally able to gradually return to regularly working out and other physical activities after nursing a very slowly healing shoulder injury for the past couple of months since the accident. To me, that’s the most important part. Cars are replaceable, health and wellness isn’t. Turns out that most of my hobbies and pastimes require consistent use of my dominant arm or lifting heavy things, so I had been feeling (only somewhat dramatically) like I was atrophying into a useless pile of goo. I’m glad to be strongly back on the upswing heading into the new year.

Here’s to hoping this new car makes it past the decade-old milestone that my Prius wasn’t allowed to reach!