Our second major repair will take place on the Prius, and once again it’s a cosmetic item. In fact, we’ve had 3 incidents in the Prius, none of which has affected the mechanical or electrical systems. It’s 2 years today what I bought the car, and so far we’ve had:

• Rear hit by someone when backing out of a space
• Passenger front hit our fence
• Inside eaten by our dog.

The first incident was a mistake when backing out of a space. It wasn’t me, but it resulted in about $1100 worth of replacement panels on the read of the car. The second incident was me. The car slipped coming down our road, I had no control, managed to slow and just slide into part of a ditch and hit the vinyl fence I’d put up. A year earlier and I’d have just gone into the pasture. The front quarter panel snapped one tab and so it doesn’t quite fit flush, and we lost part of the lower grill around the fog light, but no damage. Alignment was even fine.

This is the latest incident.

Our dog got accidently locked in the car one night. My wife was going out, opened the car to turn out the light, didn’t see Deuce race in (he hates to be left behind), closed the car and didn’t find him until about 8am. It was a cold night, Deuce is fine, and we can’t blame him at all. He tried to get out, as you can see, and also ate through part of a seat belt that I think we need to replace. This door panel will probably be a nice charge as well.

In the 2 years, we’ve had just oil changes and a 30k service for maintenance. I think we’ve averaged close to 50mpg year around in this car across almost 44k miles. We’ve driven a lot, and with the tax credit we got, I think we’ve covered any “hybrid tax” that we paid. We’ve also replaced the tires.

The car has worked out very well for us. For a family of 5, it’s a little small, though we can all go to out for the night in it. We can carry quite a few groceries in the back, and while gas mileage suffers, it works fine.

This winter I even went skiing 6 or 7 times in the Prius. I took the little kids (7 and 10) a few times and piled in my snowboard, my son’s small one, and my daughter’s skis along with a big bag of clothes and we did fine.

Overall, a great purchase for us.