(no subject)

My car won't start. Had AAA jump it this morning. Drove around for 40ish mins. Drove it again a few hours later, worked fine. Then tried again a few hours after that and the electrics would come on but the engine wouldn't start. After a few tries, even the electrics stopped. Conclusion: battery isn't holding a charge any more.

Does anyone have advice other than "have it towed to the dealership and do what they say"? Really, I'm good with computers but totally fail at cars, so I'm open to ideas here, especially if they save me the time and money I'm afraid this is going to take for them to just replace the old battery with a new one, something I think even I could do.

Needing to vent for a sec...

Called several places about getting a replacement battery for my car (thanks a ton for all the advice people offered!), but none of them even had a listing for the type of battery an '03 Prius would take. Finally called a dealership. According to them, it uses a battery that:

a) Is generally only carried by dealerships
b) Costs $400, instead of around $100 like the batteries in most cars

I am really feeling like a tool for having bought this car. Well, I've felt like that since I bought it and it really sank in that for the price I paid for it used I could have gotten a new car that got maybe 5mpg less than it does (it gets about 38, though it would probably be higher if I did more city driving). Shortly after I bought it, the "hybrid battery", as opposed to the regular starting-the-car battery died. That cost about two-@#$@#ing-thousand dollars to replace. Now the regular batter is gone and it turns out that that, too is some "special", stupidly expensive part.

I mean, I can pay for it so it could be worse, but aaaaaargh.



Edit: Hmmmm... if only this didn't look quite so sketchtastic...
Edit 2: Actually, I think I'm going to go with this. Talked to the guy who runs the place on the phone and it seems legit, and I've read threads like this one that point out (third reply down) that a 12V battery is a 12V battery and so if it fits in the battery compartment I should be good... right?