Hey there guys, I'm checking out a 2005 Prius with 143k miles on it. It was apparently a florida car and my main question for the community is whether or not 143,000 miles is significant for a prius of this generation. I just thought I'd check in and get your input before making an offer. It has dents in the front right but I'm not too worried about them the car has a clean title so these dents really just act to lower the price for me as I'm not too interested in style points. Thanks!
143k for a 12 YO car is not too much at all, regardless of the make/model and the Prius just happens to be one of the TOP for reliability on high miles vehicles. However, time is harder on the battery pack than miles, so if the pack has not been replaced, it's on BORROWED TIME and you need to account for that in the price.
In Florida at that age the hybrid battery is probably on its last legs. The heat kills it especially if the owner was a knucklehead and let the car sit in the sun all day without a windshield shade and get extremely high cabin heat daily. So not knowing the price as you never posted it please add $2500 to it for a new battery unless your technically and electronically capable of playing whack a mole and replace individual modules on the battery pack itself. If your in the market for a Prius buy a mini vci from amazon it has Toyota Techstream software that will allow you to look at the hybrid battery voltages and any dtc codes it may have logged. $25.
$1,000..........Deal. $10,000..........Not. In between? It doesn't matter, because even if you get the car for $1,000, if you don't have any money left over for the things that WILL go wrong with a 12-year-old car then you can't afford it. The battery will be about $2000 if you can install it yourself, but you also have to worry about trivial little things like motor, transaxles, inverters, brakes, suspension bits, tires, exhaust (even though Florida is unencumbered by totalitarian government inspections) and all of the other trivialities of driving a car that's 3/4 of the way through it's life cycle. Good Luck!
Deal or not will need to know the price in comparison to kbb price. The dents i would do paintless dent repair which should cost around $200. One thing to keep in mind that 2006 prius comes with Aux jack and backup camera. Aux is must have for me for playing songs in Spotify.
