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My wife and I are considering to buy a car, but most of our trips will probably be around 2-4 miles long (drive a kid to school and back, stop by a supermarket). And, maybe, one longer trip once a week.

We were looking into getting a Mazda 3, but it has a direct injection engine. And direct injection seems to have a reputation for eventual carbon build up if used for short trips (or with other bad driving habits). So I also looked into getting a gas Toyota Corolla. Supposedly, it has a "direct injection with port injection" engine.

Question: is port injection preferred for our use case if we would like to keep a car for 10-15 years?

We are first-time car buyers frustrated by the amount of options to consider, so any perspective would be helpful.

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    I realize you already have a lot to think about, but your application is literally the perfect use-case for an electric vehicle. Virtually all of them these days have DC fast charging, and that makes even transcontinental trips very achievable.
    – Harper - Reinstate Monica
    Feb 10 at 21:57
  • I'd LOVE to buy an EV! Except that here in Toronto we can't realistically charge one, as we live in a condo and our parking lot doesn't have an outlet. As for a hybrid, they are massively popular among local Uber drivers, so it's not easy to get one... Not within the next 6 months for sure.
    – Andriy Makukha
    Feb 10 at 22:56
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    Maybe off topic here, but you can probably get it done with public charging. Hit plugshare.com and look at the charge stations around you. The orange 50kW stations restore 150 miles per charging hour (good for quick things like lunch) and the green 6kW stations restore 15-20 miles per charging hour (good for lazy mall visits or the whole workday). They are building them very rapidly so this network will enlarge.
    – Harper - Reinstate Monica
    Feb 11 at 4:23
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    I've gotta agree with @Harper-ReinstateMonica here ... an EV or even a hybrid would be your best bet. From my understanding, the thing about direct injected engines is, it doesn't matter if you are running short or long trips with them ... the intake tract will become polluted over time. Even port injected engine suffer from it, but it takes a lot longer. I haven't heard about the Corolla engine with both direct and port, but I'm sure it would help.
    – Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 ♦
    Feb 11 at 21:25
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    @Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2, definitely! Uber is more economical for us. But the thing is, we want to buy our own car. We actually feel pressured to do this by the North American car-centric culture. Because transit is relatively bad here in Toronto, while many places we wanna go are not even accessible via transit... Or impractical.
    – Andriy Makukha
    Feb 12 at 23:03

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