Hi all, I am changing jobs, and so the company Toyota Pruis is going. I shall miss it - great on company car tax and fuel, plus it was a great big gadget with loads of interesting toys to play with nad good to drive around town being an auto.

However, I will not be doing London so much now, so I need a family 4x4 estate / off roader of some sort, whilst keeping the emmissions as low as poss. I want cruise control as it has saved me many a speeding fine I am sure, and I two a caravan, drive across fields as I am involved in the Scouts, and have a dog.

I narrowed it down to the Mitsubishi Outlander and the Octy Scout (much to the amuesment of my fellow Scout leaders). The Outlander was just too tarty in the Warrior spec, and the Octy better equipped. So I will be ordering one Tuesday!

Hope it is as good as the hype about Skoda suggests!

Awesome All the best for your new buy, is there much of wait on them?

Good riddance to the waste of space that is the toyota pruis too

Out of curiosity, what mpg did you average in the Prius ? I've heard the rumours about the engine struggling to pull the weight of the batteries leading to poor economy whilst it is in use. True or not ? Also, the statements about the manufacturing of the batteries and their high lead and mercury content, along with their unreliability further erroding the green claims. Again, what have been your experiences ?

Back OT, other cars you could have considered would have been the Subaru Forester or their excellent Legacy Outback. They'll have diesel next year too.

welcome to briskoda.

Welcome to Briskoda

Thanks for the welcomes!

The Pruis will be much missed actually. I got 54mpg around London (remember it is an auto), never got a moments problem with it in 28500 miles and one and a half years motoring. It cruised well on the motorway and was very pleasant (if a tad sluggish at times) to drive. It certainly felt a hell of a lot bigger inside than my Avensis before, which I hated.

Just looked a bit oddly proportioned, and you cannot tow with one, and was a bit limiting with my Kayaking/bycyling/camping/family lifestyle - hence the Scout.

I got it for tax reasons, not environmental concerns.

Hiya.

54mpg urban's good mileage from something that big. Any idea what it did on a motorway run (if it ever got an open cruise in the S/E)? My Octy (turbodiesel) gets mid-50s on distance work, and I tend to run around speed limits.

The octy scout was in a mag test with the equivalent suburu (outback?!) and the octy won, so that bodes well.....

and as for saving the planet , even toyota will admit, that if you take into account the manufacture, and recycling of the car,(the cars whole life , from birth to death) the prius is less enviromentally friendly than a V6 JEEP...........

*sharky puts soapbox away.......

edit: apologies... just read your "got it for tax reasons, not enviroment.."

"Boris Johnson for mayor!" ... bloody congestion tax........

do you know our crap goverment has already given the power to do the road pricing scheme to the EU?!?!? I'm frightened... and looking for another job :(

sorry... off topic too.....

*sharky just shuts up..

Maybe I'm being over-optomistic, but perhaps the EU would go with the German model, where you only charge wagons, and then only for motorway work?

I did a number of long runs in it - I did 28,000 miles in a year - and on the motorway I got 58mpg odd. If I really really tried, it got over 70mpg. One 27 mile journey across country I got 72mpg, going electric only for times below 30mh (engine cuts in at 31mph) - but boy was it dull.

Great built in touch-screen mutli-display screen with almost head-up digital speedo. Weird slteples transimission, and when you stopped everything was a quiet. No engine running, and below 31mph it was so silent people stepped out in front of it as they had not heard it!

Cheers for that. I'd always wondered just how the "Pious" really compared with a decent diesel out of town. Apparently the answer is "slightly better (maybe 3mpg, but I can be kinda lead-footed), but nothing like enough to justify the extra energy costs of the hybrid manufacture".

OTOH I did once get 65mpg out of a non-turbo Citroen BX diesel cross-country, and was not "hanging about": In fact I was averaging 60mph on mixed single and dual carriageway, slowing to 30 through towns on the s/c bits, and it was a 200 mile round trip.