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Comment by eduction | Hacker News Reader

Totally irrelevant links — the assertion was about hybrid cars, those links speak to cars overall.

The Toyota Prius debuted in the US in 2000. I’d argue 23 years is simply not sufficient to make an argument about long term reliability—particularly given that sales took a while to ramp, and any issues in, say, the first 10 years are likely to be dismissed as teething problems.

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The article was about consumer goods in general, so data about cars overall is more relevant than a single brand. Nonetheless, the Toyota Prius is, by reputation, a very reliable car. Here a used car website used it's data to estimate car model's lifespan, finding that a Toyota Prius has a potential lifespan of 250000 miles, much greater than anything from the 1980s.

https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/cars-that-will-la...

Not to get too deep into this, in the 80s cars were crap. That is based only on my own personal experience. But I have no idea how reliable cars made 70 years ago were (like the kitchen appliance mentioned in the article). I've seen really old cars still on the road, but those are probably owned by collectors / people that take effort to preserve those types of cars.

Cars made in the 40s and 50s were very unreliable, required significantly more maintenance than modern cars. You had to service things like breaker points, batteries and carburetors every few thousand miles. Most modern cars can go 10,000 miles between checkups and major components can go 100k+ miles with no work needed.

In the UK, the Prius seems to be used very widely by taxi companies. In fact most of the Prius's I see are in taxi company livery. To get the best out of a Prius (or, I guess, any hybrid) you should drive it non-aggressively, avoiding steep accelleration and braking. That may have something to do with the longevity of the Prius.

I've owned two Toyotas, neither ever broke down, and one of them saved my life (in a crash). If I were in the market for a car, I'd get a Toyota.

> Toyota Prius > argument about long term reliability

But you can tell a bit about their long term reliability by looking at heavy users like Taxis and Ubers.

The Prius is used because it is cheap, cheap to run, and cheap to maintain -- even by outlier users like Uber drivers (also note drivers are usually buying consumer versions).

Arguing about 23 years is a strawman - which would mean you could never buy anything new because new models haven't yet had even a few years of usage prediction.

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