$13k for a 2013 Corolla LE with 31k miles? Highway robbery! I paid $15k new for mine (about $16.5k with tax and license) and KBB says private party resale at 39k miles should be around $10k or about $7.5k as a trade in if it's in "good" condition. Craigslist says asking prices here are a little higher. I suspect you could pick one up in very good condition for significantly less than $10k if you shop around. New ones are heavily discounted in the Bay Area. Would be around $16.5k based on local advertised prices before tax and license for a 2017. Some negotiation would get that price down, I'm sure.
I will be looking at private sellers, I just figured CarMax was a good place to find what the appropriate comparison would be between the two. I don't doubt they're cheap in California, but here in Houston there aren't all that many around. I found a 2015 Volt for $12000 private sale and Corollas are all over the place, but I'll be doing a test drive at CarMax hopefully this Saturday between the Corolla and Volt just to compare.
edit: Just realized you were talking about Corollas not Volts. My bad!
Plug them both into the edmunds.com TCO calculator to compare expenses. I bet the Corolla wins.
Those prices are both about $2k too high. You should be shopping private owners instead of dealers (but the dealers are handy for test drives).
The Corolla wins, but not by much. $25,833 vs $26,205 over 5 years. Granted that's assuming 15k miles per year and a big price difference. Not sure how their data takes the Volt into account, since how you drive it can have a big impact on fuel costs. Some people use them with all electricity all the time, others were fleet vehicles that never got charged and were basically a hybrid. Basically the $400 difference seems within the margin of error of the calculation.
How many miles will you be putting on your car each year? How much will each of those miles be costing you?
What are the expected maintenance needs for each car? The Volt *will* need new batteries; do you know how much that will cost?
Why are you letting a girlfriend's tastes dictate what car you get? [A spouse should get a voice, a fiancee maybe, but a girlfriend?]
Can you lower your car use (bike to work or errands sometimes?) What about buying something a few years older and investing the money?
Just a few friendly face punches.
Don't know on batteries since people haven't really had to replace them, so it's not a common repair you can find the cost on. From my research there are multiple components in the battery, so depending what goes wrong there are specific things to be replaced.
The girlfriend comment was a bit tongue in cheek. If I really wanted a Prius, I'd get a Prius. She'd hate it (but it wouldn't be a huge deal), and I'd probably get ridiculed at work pretty often, so that's not the hill I want to die on when other options are just as good. We've been dating 3 years and living together 2, so it's not someone I just met two weeks ago telling me how to live. I do appreciate the concern though.
Something older is also possible, 3-4 years old just seems like the sweet spot for used cars. Old enough that depreciation is slowing down, young enough that owners haven't messed them up with poor maintenance yet. I'll probably try out an older Corolla at CarMax to compare.
I'm a wuss and live in Houston, so I'm not biking these days. I did it in Austin, but Houston is a whole other beast. Yes I know about the article on the lawyer who lives downtown and bikes 40 miles or something like that, but it's not worth it to me to save <15 miles of car travel. I actually live less than 4 miles from work, but go home for lunch to hang out with the girlfriend and dog.