I recently sold my Toyota Prius. It was a 2005, which was the second generation of Toyota’s seminal hybrid compact that kind of defined the market segment for a decade or more.
It served me well as a daily driver–which, in my world of working from a home office, driving press cars and magazine projects, really means a couple-times-a-week driver–for over three years. The recent acquisition of a Hyundai Ioniq 5 as my “normal” car meant that the Prius had to go.
When I bought the Prius, I wrote a column about how it felt like “the Miata of derpy cars.” It was just so good at fulfilling its mission parameters that you couldn’t help but have some respect for it. It turns out I wasn’t alone in this feeling.
I listed the Prius for sale on the GRM message board early on a Sunday afternoon. Thirty-four minutes later, I had a sales agreement for the car from one of our board regulars who was replacing his higher-mileage, second-gen Prius with my cleaner example.
A few hours after that, he had a sales agreement for his car IN THE SAME THREAD. He also had interest on another Prius he was going to have for sale soon. (He’s kind of a second-gen Prius guy and has a side hustle working on the cars in his lakeside Ohio town.) So that’s three Priuses, in one thread, changing hands in under 24 hours.
The observations carried over onto social media. Of course I promoted the sale on my personal social media feed, and many folks lamented that they missed out on the deal when it sold so quickly on the GRM board.
Think about what we’re talking about here: We’re a sports car magazine, known for our track tests and competition-focused project cars, not Budget Used Prius Quarterly.
So why was there so much interest in these Priuses, plus the fawning posts from folks who owned and raced actual cool cars about how awesome second-gen Priuses are? Are we all having a collective stroke?
Some of the comments shed some light on the cognitive dissonance. Our friend Dale Lomas, who spends his days building trick suspension setups for fast cars at his new business, For Racing Use Only, located at the Nürburgring so you know he’s got some street cred here, summed it up nicely: “If you’re spending $$$$$ on racing, it makes sense to save it on the streets.”
Adam Dawson followed up with, “The Venn-diagram of ‘self funded racers’ and ‘I need something simple that runs’ is a circle.” More solid gold.
Pithy comments aside, the general sentiment in my posts about the experience was one of profound respect for the simple mission of the humble Prius and the effectiveness with which is fulfilled its design parameters. And that made me kind of reflect on my perspective on the idea of “car enthusiasts.”
We tend to think of car enthusiasm as a love of performance cars, valuing speed and grip and response above all else. And while these metrics are exciting, I think the reality is we overlook the enthusiasm created by something just being super effective at fulfilling its mission. It’s totally okay to respect something for just being good at being a car and doing its job with no pretension of anything else aside from brutal competence.
Folks are attracted to cars for all sorts of reasons. Myself and probably most of you reading this certainly bias toward the performance side. I want to know lap times and gear ratios and rotor sizes as that’s the stuff that gets me excited. But for three years, I drove this Prius and respected the hell out of it for being really, really good at fulfilling its mission. It was a hyper-useful space pod that asked for nothing except a few gallons of 87 octane a month.
I see some of this non-performance enthusiasm in my own wife. Even though she was raised in SoCal hotrod culture–her daily in high school was a Pontiac GTO that her dad built–she’s never really been a car nerd. But when she got her Ioniq 5 last year–her first EV–and started spending time talking to other EV owners at charging stations, she found herself becoming interested and excited about a car as something other than a tool.
Ultimately, I’m down with anyone who sees cars as anything other than a burden. Whether your enthusiasm come from a place of passion or respect makes it no more or less real, and at the end of the day, we’re more alike than we are different. That fact only took 34 minutes to become apparent to me.
Comments
If Toyota still made the Prius V, it would be at the top of my “next car” list.
Even cooler would be a Toyota Prius truck. Wait a minute …
Someone (okay, it might have been Tim) once said that a vehicle should do at least one thing well: set lower lap times, safely get you to work, carry stuff, etc.
Guilty as Charged of becoming a Prius Fan-boy:
In reply to Colin Wood :
Seems like I saw a forum of Prius Live-A- Boards a few years ago. I could in our V if it came down to it. Nice central heat and air. 
I just bought a used PriusV as a commute car to keep the miles off my “nice” car.
What are some cars that might fit in the Circle Venn diagram as being both an economical daily driver and a race car?
In reply to rrrtiii :
That was goal with our Golf GTI project.
For a while, I only had one car for both commuting and autocross: my 1.6L Miata. My SE-R, Rabbit GTI and CRX also served the same roles, although I realize that was a while ago.
In reply to David S. Wallens :
I was pleasantly surprised at how normal the GTI drove on the highway. The suspension wasn’t rough at all and road noise was minimal. And didn’t it also return like 30+ mpg?
In reply to rrrtiii :
Mazda 2 and Honda Fit.
Ehh, I didn’t really care for our 2009 Prius. It didn’t do anything wrong, per se, but our Fusion is nicer in every aspect, just as reliable, and gets nearly the same MPG. There is a hybrid version of it if I was chasing mileage numbers.
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