Jack Baruth thinks that any vehicle can be entertaining to drive. Well he’s never owned one of these. This 5-speed base model is a masterpiece of simplicity… and boredom. I used every trick I know to find happiness with it. Rev it in fifth. Rev it in third. Hypermile it. Even throw in a sound system to replace the chintziest radio this side of a Tercel EZ. Nothing worked. But then again this Prizm has almost nothing that can break in it either. This generation Prizm is arguably the most reliable GM model of the 1990’s (thanks Toyota!). And with only 126k miles and $1500 in the hole I can…
Rent: Sending out a five-speed as a rental is a very tricky business. I always sit with the person during the test drive and give them an Israeli airport screener’s grilling beforehand. If they ‘say’ they can drive a stick, that doesn’t count. Words are cheap, and a lot of folks these days don’t have the recent experience.
One too many stalls or a bad shift and it’s back to the lot. So far all my customers have made the cut and at a $140 weekly rate, the Prizm gets plenty of attention. I also wound up with a spare 5-speed and engine thanks to a finance customer who thought a double yellow line is nothing more than a car suggestion. I can see this car surviving 50 rentals with the spare shifter which would yield quite a return.
Lease: But so would a well-constructed finance deal. $500 down and $50 a week for 15 months. would more than double my profit… or not. Nothing curdles my blood more than someone who takes a car that had been well maintained over a decade and then tears it up. This car could probably take the abuse. But I’m not putting someone’s kid in it. This car can go to a fellow who values it’s fuel economy and low cost of operation.
Sell: If you ask for $2995, the prospective customer will want it at two grand. Put it online for $3500 and you’re still going to attract lowball offers. Why? Because cheap base cars always attract basically cheap customers. The ones who are good at math will tell you about the $500 Ford Tempo they bought five years ago, and, well, if you find another like that, let them know and they will bring the scooter loot. The ones that are bad at math won’t know how to drive a stick at all. Speaking of which…
Keep: My wife would kill me if I made her drive this car. Minimal side safety for the kids. A ton of old buzzes and noises from the powertrain, and of course the ultimate killer. It’s a stick. Of course she could learn. But having to heel/toe it through Atlanta traffic after gymnastics, basketball, and chess club would be bad for the home life. Not to mention my conscience. I can not put my family in something that is one side impact away from the scrapper.
As for me, my 1st gen Insight surprisingly has 4-star front and side safety ratings. Which means that it was designed to be more structurally rigid than the Westboro Baptist Church at a gay biker bar. This Prizm is either 3 or lower. A little rigid for the standards of it’s time. But not Westboro rigid. I’m not keeping it.
But what would you do? Rent it in the hope that the 5-speed tranny’s can survive the brutality of it all? Lease, and trade the rental profits for the security of a good new owner? Sell it to a family of tightwads? Or keep it and hope that you can pull off a ‘Blues Brothers’ if the folks from Westboro ever come to your town. What says you?
Every customer thus far has been over 50 and
High on quality and low on thrills.
They rent manual cars all around the world. They survive.
Rent for a while, then sell to someone who appreciates the frugality of it all.
Lease or finance it. It’s practical basic transport and it should hold up to abuse over the terms of the payment.
cheap, easy to maintain, and an abundance of cheap spare parts. Sounds like a perfect candidate for rental, ride that sucker till it dies!
I owned one of these cars for maybe 6 months. Bought it after the transmission in my 1992 Nissan Sentra SE-R went south. My Prizm had the 3-speed auto, and I died a little inside every day I drove it. It was a very nice little car, in the same way that you’d compliment someone’s refrigerator, but it had no soul. The funny thing is, I think both those cars made some mag’s 10 best list for a few years.
It’s certainly hard to believe that Toyota outdid itself by cheapening the Corolla into this – seven levels below a Tercel! But they did sell – somehow. Rent it, as it is the perfect car for that purpose. Bland and invisible to the max – perfect.
I’d sell it and move on. Or, keep it as your around town back up car. Manual transmission cars are popular rentals everywhere but here in the US. We are too busy talking on cell phones, text messaging or looking at the nav screen. One of the best anti-theft devices these days is a manual transmission — carjackers don’t know how to drive them!
Rent until drivetrain is shot. Then replace drivetrain with your spare and sell.
Surely it is at least entertaining to have basic and reliable transportation for $1500. Then again, you might have real “character” in a $1500 Alfa.
The market value of a 1994 Prizm with 126K is $1500, so you won’t make anything trying to sell it. If you rent it out @ $140 a week for 50 weeks, that’s $7K, so that’s the best way to go. Then if you still want to sell it, sell it for $1K after you’re done renting it out. $7K + $1K = $8K, not bad for your $1500 investment.
Sounds good on paper… assuming you could get it rented each week (hyyuge “If”).
Actually, I’ve obviously missed the Genesis of this column, but who exactly rents used cars? Typical rental customers looking for a better deal? Or people on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum? Don’t the Enterprises of the world charge $220 for an economy size for something new?
Enterprise near me charges $150/week for a new, compact car. Good luck renting a 16 yr old one for $140/week.
Sell it.
There will always be “would-a, should-a, could-a” cars. Life is too short to keep this durable, yet painfully dull car around. It all comes down to love. Either you love it or you don’t. Don’t respect it. Someone else can love it. Someone frightenly cheap. Someone you wouldn’t want to be friends with because they would never pick up a bar tab.
I like these kinds of cars, but not this one. It has absolutely no personality of any kind. There is absolutely nothing lovable about it. No quirks, no style. Sell it.
Ah, but painfully dull is good in a rental. Especially if you’re the one doing the renting.
Nothing lovable? Surely you jest – the rear windows roll down! In the future, please give credit where credit is due! Thank you…I think!
You’re right about selling it; any customer really interested will be tighter than a pair of jeans in a country bar, and there be little profit. Keeping it for personal use makes no sense either. Rent or lease knowing that even if a customer tears it up it will have put in a good lifetime of service before it goes.
I took a tropical green ’94 prizm off I-87 north of Albany NY backwards at 70mph in moderate rain when I was much younger and not very cognizant of the virtue of replacing tires before they went bald (or driving responsibly, for that matter). That was relatively exciting. Would have been far more exciting had the Thruway Authority not removed a particular grove of trees from that very median the prior year. The car was none the worse for wear, save for being covered in grass. Much nicer shade of green, I might add.
Other than that, it was fairly reliable and as boring as everyone else has indicated.
“Westboro Baptist Church at a gay biker bar” oh man, thats funny.
sell it.
As gas prices continue the march towards $5 a gallon this summer the value of this car will only go up. Lease for now, but get ready to sell once someone decides their old SUV is killing them in the wallet. Rent a car with 126K? In my life the only purpose for renting a car was: current car in the shop or business travel. To neither of these is the answer a ’94 Prizm. I honestly would ride my bike before renting a car with 126K on the clock, unless it was a Toyota HiLux and I found myself in a third-world country.
I think JM is on to something. Rent it for a few months, sell it when gas spikes in the summer.
I had one of these.
I don’t remember it being all that boring, but it was my first car, so what the hell did I know? The tendency to start shaking and making “wugga-wugga” noises at 75 MPH was certainly exciting. Keep it at 65 and stay on the back roads where 65 isn’t a terribly good idea and you could wring some fun out of it.
I crashed it, of course, since that’s what you do when you’re 17 and stupid.
I’d say sell. Sounds like the perfect car for a high school or college student: reliable, efficient, dead boring to drive. The safety’s the only concern. Just not this particular college student.
Have you looked at what your potential liability would be if you rented or leased the car? What if the responsible person who is renting the car hits a bus full of Nuns and honor students? Would you be responsible for the millions in damages? Remember, partially responsible might as well be entirely responsible if you are the one with the “deep pockets.” I’d probably just sell it, but the upside is certainly greater if you lease or rent it.
My carpool driver drove me a few days in her mother’s beige on beige Prizm. Reliable, boring. Grandma let the granddaughter drive it a few times though when she needed a car after having wrecked a perfectly usable black Cavalier coupe, and (can you see this one coming) she wrecked Gramma’s Prizm too. Sell it to a college student, who will thus have more time and money to devote to getting through school.
Or, you could sell it to someone who already has a Shadow and an Eclipse….
I bought a 1995 automatic one of these for $1500 a few years ago.
104,000 miles at the time.
Used it as a daily driver for almost 2 years and then sold it for $2,000.
Other than oil changes, only had to replace the starter ($135).
The buyer was an assistant service manager at Toyota for his high school teenage daughter.
It was in excellent condition. The buyer probably could fix it himself at work if it broke down.
BTW….the non daily driver was an Audi A4, so I could handle the dullness going to work.
The A4 was one with the 4/50K service included (including brakes), so the Prism enabled me to get the full 4 years and 50K worth of included service from Audi. So if was profitable in more ways than one.
A lot of excellent comments here.
Manual trannie cars are a pain to get rented. But when they do, the renters tend to keep them for very long periods of time. Anywhere between 3 weeks and 3 months. Virtually all of them have been in their 40’s and older.
As for insurance, I have fleet insurance. I also only rent to folks that already can afford full coverage with a $500 deductible. This weeds out a lot of folks that can be high risk. I know I leave money on the table… but these are older cars. The cars last far longer this way.
Rental competition is actually pretty minimal in the outskirts. There are only two other rental places in a county with over 100,000 people. Enterprise prices accordingly and I have no trouble filling in the gap.
There are only two other rental places in a county with over 100,000 people.
I think I have to drive more than 100 miles to get to a county with less than 100,000 people. Going north, you’d have to get north of Saginaw & Bay City. Going west I can drive clear across the state from here to the Indiana state line and even though I’d be traveling through plenty of rural areas, I’d never be in a county with less than 100,000 people.
Steve, is there a Toyota dealer in your county? Toyota typically only has stores in cities of 90K people or more.
Do you have any friends that do your kind of thing but in a big city?
I don’t think the Prizm is so boring. At least not as boring as a Camry or Accord. They try to be substantial and showy, but are soulless midsize boxes.
The Prizm doesn’t care what you think about it. It knows that it’s ugly and is extremely flimsy in the body and interior. It’s because under the hideously underwhelming bodywork that has been self-lightening in the best Colin Chapman tradition, this Corolla has the soul of a lion. I have a ’92 and I drive the 13″ wheels off that thing. I corner like I’m on a race track and when I accelerate, you can hear all 92 bees buzzing. Driving on the highway certainly isn’t boring, as minivans feel like 18-wheelers and 18-wheelers unleash gale force winds as they fly by. I have never driven my V8’s as fast as 70 feels in this tin can. I park it at the train station and use it in the winter. It’s uniquely suited to these purposes, as I can pass SUV’s in the snow and people don’t vandalize or steal it at the station. It’s got roll-up windows on plastic regulators and no intermittent wipers. The inner door hardware is of such low quality, that I have to go in there several times a year to fix the system of coat-hangers and plastic clips that keep it together. It shows it’s heritage of GM affiliation by the sag of it’s headliner and the fade of it’s tomato-paste colored paint. Everything about this car makes you want to hate it, but you can’t help but love it. Mine was $500 and had 130k miles when I bought it.
I kinda like these. Boring as hell, but great to have around when gas shoots up. Great mileage, Toyota reliability without the stigma of actually owning a Toyota. I’m considering getting one to ride out this oil spike.
oh, jeezus! Steve, I agree with you completely about the ’94 Prizm. Gawd, what an awful car. My best friend had one (with the stick), and you can see him and his Prizm here http://motorlegends.com/carspeop7.htm
I drove that thing once, and I swear, if all cars were that awful I think I’d just forget about cars. Baruth probably never drove one; he would have been so frustrated with the thing he probably would have attacked it with a sledge hammer.
Ya know, I had a 93 Prizm and I actually liked it. It had a moonroof, mag wheels, and a slick shifting five speed.
It was somewhat fun to drive and was nicely appointed. Ordered it new from a dealer with exactly what I wanted.
And I would keep the thing and rent it.
You have a spare engine and MT? There’s another option: race it in LeMons. Talk to Murilee about fielding your own racing team! Think of the boost THAT will give your business, with “Home of Lang Racing Team” emblazoned over your door.
Why all the hate for the Prizm? It has all of the virtues of the Corolla (bulletproof drivetrain, solid mechanicals) at a cheaper price. I’ve always been a big bang for the buck kind of guy and a low mileage Prizm is going to be about as cheap transportation for a few years as you are likely to find. It’s like buying a Kenmore washing machine on clearance, knowing that you got a great deal on a machine made by Whirlpool. The Prizm rolled off the same NUMMI lines as the Corollas that Toyota sold.