There is a blue 2002 Honda insight for sale near me for $1500. I can probably get it for cheaper. Non-ac car, cracked windshield, and a dead battery. I see replacement batteries for $2000 and replacing them does not look too intimidating.
AC is nothing to me, I rarely use it (if ever) but it may turn off a lot of buyers.. that and the seemingly daunting task of either replacing the battery or having it replaced. What else should I worry about?
What is the mileage. There are perfect ones around here with sub 150K mileage and new batteries for 3500-4500$.
If its a manual I would hve a hard time not slapping a K20 into it and using it as a daily if you fit well.
it is a manual.. and it is the only one for sale on CL that is any colour but silver for about 200 miles. I just want something to zip back and forth to work that just sips the gas. The fact that it is not a prius is a plus
My Honda Insight has been sitting for about 2.5 years. Yesterday i jump started it and drove it about 10 miles. 
Battery replacement is not too hard.
1st and 2nd gear synchros you should be worried about.
Vigo said:1st and 2nd gear synchros you should be worried about.
This. They'll all need new batteries at this point and they're not cheap. Do look into a grid charger. I have one from Hybrid Automotive and I have been impressed with them and their service.
can't you just replace battery cells with the insights? Or is it the whole big assembly?
I'm just doing a quick skim of his build thread and found a page with one of the batteries opened up. Looks like you can replace parts instead of the whole big thing, but again, quick skim, not actually reading.
If you're a cheap bastard (and who here isn't) and you have the time, it's worth pulling the pack and working your way through the sticks to see what's going on. Vigo is right about the synchros. I pretty much hated driving mine even when it was all working. I still want to try and live with an auto one for a while to see if it was the whole car that I didn't like or just that driveteain combination.
Very much worth playing with, they're neat.
Thanks for the advice.. Now to take a good hard look at my finances
I can mail you the battery conditioner thingy that I used if you decide to give it a go. I had it set out for Vigo, but I'm convinced he's never going to get to his.
I don't blame you!! 
I have been moving probably thousands of lbs of stuff from my old house/garage into my new shop. The Insight is 1800 lbs of that.
I still want to try and live with an auto one for a while
You'd lose the ability to modulate the clutch for a strong launch but once you got past that first 10-20mph the CVT is probably much less frustrating to drive.
FWIW, I have a customer with an Insight and a disconnected battery pack, and his fuel economy minder is always in the high 50s or very low 60s every time it comes in, running gas-only.
We did have to replace the starter a couple years after the battery was disconnected, apparently it is not really meant to start the engine all the time. Or maybe it was just old.
the trouble with the battery pack being disconnected, it sets of the CEL. A lit CEL, for any reason, is an inspection fail in NJ. With this in mind, I will have to fix the battery pack right off the bat. I will let you know about the conditioner.
edit
I talked to the seller, I am going to see the car thursday. It's been on CL for a month, probably due to the bad battery, manual trans, and lack of AC. I am hoping I can use that to really knock him down on the price.
if I buy it, I am considering changing the rims, I find the stock insight rims nasty and the tyre choices at 14 inch to be abysmal. Will regular 15 inch civic rims fit? I think the offset is 43?
Typical honda choices apply, the wheel world is your oyster. Both mine had/have 15s, although i found the typical 15" diameters too tall to suit the car in my eye. I have 195/45/15 on front of my remaining and 165/50/15 in the rear.
mad_machine said:if I buy it, I am considering changing the rims, I find the stock insight rims nasty and the tyre choices at 14 inch to be abysmal. Will regular 15 inch civic rims fit? I think the offset is?
It's an interesting little car, I had one for about a year and a half when I lived in Florida. For me it just wasn't interesting enough to overlook its faults. The first being, your not going to be getting anywhere in a hurry, you can floor it everywhere and never get a sideways glance from a cop, which can be fun, for about 10 minutes. I was always running out of IMA power just trying to keep up with traffic, and this was on flat ground.
If you buy anything other than the OE tires you're going to loose 10% of your fuel economy, its just a fact. No other low rolling resistance tire can match it.
I replaced my battery pack with a rebuilt one, worked good, got rid of the CEL was still going good when I sold the car.
Mine had A/C which was a must have in muggy south Florida, but i did have to replace the compressor after the clutch on it lunched the pulley snout.
Also like the others say, the 2-1 synchro will be shot, they all are at this point. You can fix t, but it means taking apart the box. Or you can learn to double clutch your downshifts, which is cheaper, easier, and what I opted to do.
It was cool to get it into lean burn (something only yhe manual can do) and see the instant MPG shoot up to 99 on a flat road at 55. But it gets a little tedious after a while, you start to get MPG sickness and just keep pushing for more, it's weird, you fight to get just one more MPG, driving becomes a task instead of something fun. Then if you go the other way and just hoon it everywhere you're going to get about the same MPG as any other car and just not have as much fun doing it.
I am basically considering this car for two reasons.. to keep the miles off of my Disco on my 12 mile commute to work, and I am tired of 14mpg on that same commute. With gas prices rising, this is a good thing. Aside from a few very slight rises (I can't even call them hills) and two bridges, my commute is flat. Half of it is 35mph suburban driving (traffic lights once a mile or so) and half 50mph county highway.
Basically the car tickles my inner geek and satisfies my not having to spend money on 20 gallons of fuel every two weeks. If I wanted to go fast, I would finish reassembling my saab
Go for it. If you get the IMA battery working again and end up not liking the car you can always get your money back out of it, maybe more with the following these cars have.
Then if you go the other way and just hoon it everywhere you're going to get about the same MPG as any other car and just not have as much fun doing it.
I don't really agree with this. I hauled ass everywhere and got about 45mpg average, which no normal car can do. Back when i used mine for commuting (highway mostly) there wasn't a single day i didn't hit 90+ and the top speed (112) didn't take long to get to if you were flooring it from 70 as i usually was. I found the big trick to this car was never try to accelerate in a gear higher than 3rd. If you are accelerating in 4th or 5th in a more than casual way you're doing it wrong. 3rd gear in the Insight is like 4th gear in most other cars (1:1ish) and accelerates pretty well from 50-112mph. 4th and 5th are both overdrives.
I actually think 2nd gear was the worst part of driving it, and i think if someone was using it for mostly non-highway travel I'd either suggest the CVT or avoid the whole car. On the highway it accelerates well and usually isn't the slowest thing on the road.
Agreed that above 50 it's not bad unless you want to actually keep the car from draining the battery. If you do then it's a bizarre dance between 3rd, 4th, and very seldom 5th to keep the car in it's happy place. Oddly enough, above about 65 you almost never use 5th because if you do then you rapidly drain the battery and the car gets all kinds of moody if you get the battery down super low. There is a LOT of logic that goes on in a hybrid deciding how to use/recharge the battery and in the manual Insight all of that is put on you. The people who like them really like them because driving becomes a low stakes game of energy transfer which they find fun.
well, I go see it tomorrow. He is asking $1450 for it, but it needs a winsheild and IMA battery.. and has needed one for the last 20,000 miles, so I am sure it needs a starter by now too. It's been on CL for a month so I think if I wave a grand under his nose, he will bite
It's not an insight but the comment about hooning and still getting good gas mileage reminds me of my mk4 Jetta TDI. The WORST fuel economy that car ever got was 38mpg with 4 adults in the car all city driving in 100 degree heat with the AC on. Driving it like an idiot was still about 45mpg normally and always driving at the socal raceway highway speeds of 85+. And that was on 17" wheels with BF Goodrich Comp T/As not some sort of mileage wonder LRR tire
so, I passed. Not only was the battery dead and the windshield cracked from one side to the other, it also needed egr work and according to my code reader, either new cats or new sensors. Not about to put 5 grand into a 1 grand car
A lot of them are in that shape now. That's one of the big problems with old hybrids. The battery is a HUGE part of the value of the car. 
so, I passed. Not only was the battery dead and the windshield cracked from one side to the other, it also needed egr work and according to my code reader, either new cats or new sensors
Sounds like mine. On the other hand when you start thinking about where the actual bottom is for a fairly low-production, unique, aluminum-intensive lightweight 'enthusiast car' (in a sense), it probably isn't $300/scrap-value like it is for everything normal. $1500 sounds a little high, but much less than that for a rare/unique car and the matter of plus or minus a few hundred bucks swinging your decision isn't so much a reflection of a car's value as it is of whether you're interested in dealing with it. I definitely don't plan to spend 5 grand fixing my 1k Insight, but then i've already had the 70k-mile test drive to convince me that i am willing to deal with it. It sounds like you would have passed at $800/"$5800" too so i guess the only Insight for you is one that is still working at regular price. Mine was still working when i bought it at $3800 going on 10 years ago. At that time that price would have been the ubiquitous YouTube title "I bought the cheapest running XYZ in the country" although now that'll probably get you a fairly nice one.
Related note: There's an aluminum-intensive A8L near me i can get for less than 1k with minor problems. Even if they were major problems, I just don't think a car like that is ever worth much less.
yes, the battery didn't scare me. I would just buy a new one from bumblebee and swap it out in a day. It was all the other junk from a 300,000 mile car that needed to be dealt with that put me off.
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