Repair Costs of a Hybrid Now Equal to Non-Hybrids
February 11, 2009 by admin
Repair costs for hybrid models, which initially were higher than average, have now fallen in line with those of non-hybrids.
These days, a Toyota Prius, or any other hybrid shouldn’t cost more to repair, on average, than your Corolla or Camry.
The study has been carried out by Audatex, a company that automates processing for insurance claims. Its survey looked at the costs of auto repairs for cars from model years 2001 through 2008.
It found that in the first few years (2001-2006), hybrid cars did cost slightly more to repair. The Toyota Prius cost 8.4 percent more to repair than other cars of a similar size in the early years.
The study attributes the difference to the relatively few Priuses sold in the model’s first years, especially prior to the release of the second-generated Prius for the 2004 model year. Prius sales didn’t cross 100,000 until 2005, against hundreds of thousands of Honda Civics and Accords and Toyota Corollas and Camrys sold each year.
The repair-cost difference was by far most pronounced for cars from 2006 and before. It seems to have vanished almost completely for the two latest model years (2007 and 2008).
The Audatex report studied cumulative repair costs for the Prius against those for the entire class of gasoline-powered economy cars, which together sell many hundreds of thousands a year. Almost 70 percent of that group is made up of just five cars: the Honda Accord, Honda Civic, Toyota Corolla, Nissan Sentra, and Hyundai Elantra.
A second piece of the study compared costs for cars that came in both regular and hybrid versions, including the Honda Civic, Toyota Camry, and every Lexus hybrid (except the upcoming Lexus HS250h).
The graph shows the average repair costs by model year for hybrid vehicles versus their gasoline counterparts. (Source: Audatex Insight)
The majority of these repairs were for crash damage and the like, not for mechanical failures. In fact, regular hybrid maintenance occurs less often and is therefore less costly than for comparable conventional vehicles. Toyota has said that not a single Prius battery pack has needed replacement due to malfunction or simply losing capacity.
Since the replacement packs cost thousands of dollars, that’s critical. The company said the only packs that had to be replaced were in cars damaged in collisions, and it has always claimed that the packs last the life of the car with little degradation.
Last fall, Toyota cut prices of replacement packs for the first-generation (2001-2003) Prius to $2,299; a current Prius pack will set you back $2,588.
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