My dealership north of Chicago always has 20 plus new prius on the lot but last Saturday I was watching the sales manger moving around all the cars in the showroom to get out a red Prius. I made a joke to him as this operation took 10 minutes, I said 'can't you guys sell one from the back?' then Ed replied this is our last one!! The Prius was selling good all year with gas here at $3.65-$4.25 but gas now is at $3.35-3.47 and they all flew out in the last 2 weeks. He could not pin point why. I have a 2012 Prius4 and pulling 62mph all week in and around town for work.................. It would be hard to drive anything else ever again. I laugh we guys at work Bitch that they just filled up at $65-85 a tank.................. I Bitch if I toss in more than a $20 a week in
This is nice to hear but so far in 2014 hybrid+plug-in sales are down to 3.2% versus about 3.8% in 2013. 3.2% of course is not too bad. Maybe the year end sales will be super for green cars? Or maybe yes even though gaso prices are low now, the Chicago area is vulnerable to gaso price spikes as the reformulated gasoline is apparently occsasional supply issue out there. Wish we could get state-by-state hybrid sales data to understand more about local trends, but that state sales data is very hard to come by, except we do get the California data each quarter.
It was likely a combination of gas prices on the gradual increase (yes it's going down right now, but overall I only saw gas under $3 once in the last 4 years in SE Wisconsin, and then it shot right back up after a week or so), people needing to replace a gas guzzler, and I'm sure the Toyota incentives helped too.
From posts in the last day looks like the 2015s are now coming in. You probably caught them between deliveries and they probably managed to clear out all the old ones in prep for the new.
