I am commuting a lot to the city, but I was driving a not so efficient Pilot. The wife was driving the Odyssey. After a service on the Odyssey around January of this year, we discovered that it needed a lot of work. At the same time Toyota had some great incentives for the Prius. My wife also needed the extra seating that the Pilot had for some kid carpooling. It was the right opportunity to get a Prius.
In order to find the best price, I did a lot of online comparision shopping. I ended up using cars.com and having dealers send me quotes. If you know what you want, they will be pretty responsive. It turns out that a lot of dealers had a lot of inventory, which was in contrast to the prior sales history for the Prius. After haggling with 2 different fleet managers, I went in and bought the car at Magnusson’s in Palo Alto.
Interesting coincidence, the sales guy kept a book of the past buyers that were famous. I found out that this guy sold a Prius to Andy Hertzfeld, and had his signature. This didn’t break my concentration, we still had to make it through the finance department upsells. It was just interesting.
Anyways, we got one and I’ve been driving it for about 5 months. It’s a great car and the mileage is excellent! The tech in the car is better than anything else I’ve ever seen. Also, the NAV is so good. I will always have that in any future car. Overall, fantastic car.