An era has ended. After 11 years of Toyota ownership, on January 4 we sold our Prius to my friend Ellen’s family. It’s a strangely bittersweet moment: I haven’t driven the Prius more than a couple times in the last five months, and when I did, it felt sluggish and slow.

…But we’ve done so many things in the Prius. It was our first car, and served us reliably for the entire time we owned it. We drove it all over New England, and Ian filled it to the gills and drove it back to Washington when we moved home in December 2009. I drove it all over Washington, bike on the rack and again filled full, for the Bike Alliance teacher trainings I did in 2011 and 2012. We took it to Seaside many times, a four-hour trip that sometimes too much longer with traffic.

Through it all, the car served us well and reliably. It consistently got 42 mpg average, not the ambitious 60 mpg advertised, but it kept on getting that 42 mph for 11 years. Pretty phenomenal.

Now we have the Bolt, and while I love having this all-electric vehicle, I wish Toyota had made it. We’ve had such good reliability with Toyota, I’m sorry to see it go.