I’m probably not the first person to think this…

I was talking to myself about my upcoming Prius purchase. (Yes, I do that a lot. But not when the men in white coats are looking.) And two thoughts were running through my head:

  1. The energy savings between this and my existing Corolla are not cost effective, so I’m really just doing this because the car is geeky-cool and sends a message
  2. I’m going to have to get another Macintosh bumper sticker for the new car

And it suddenly hit me: The Prius is the Macintosh of cars. It’s geeky-cool, it has features that others are starting to copy, it does things just a little differently than most of the cars out there, and it’s more expensive than other cars in its class.

Well, that explains a lot.

6 thoughts on “I’m probably not the first person to think this…”

  1. A Mac has some pretty impressive horsepower. The Prius has none; it’s a glorified golf cart.

    Maybe start with: the Prius is an OLPC.

  5. A 65hp traction motor is nothing to sneeze at; my first-gen prius may take its own sweet time going from 30 to 60mph (“own sweet time” == 6-7 seconds,) but 0-30 is gratifyingly sportscarlike (burn rubber on dry pavement? Yes. Beat bicycles off the line? Yes.) and that’s with a 45hp traction motor. I would find it difficult to believe that a 50% larger traction motor would result in worse performance.

    I don’t know anything about the OLPC, but given that it either runs frankenOS or Windows it’s not much like the Prius. The Prius works, and doesn’t have a horribly bodged user interface.

    (The new Prii can be retrofitted as plug-in hybrids, which gives you an embarrassingly high MPG even without trying to hypermile, so it’s sort of like frankenOS in that regard, but then again the first thing I did to my new Macbook Air was to kill goddamn vim dead and replace it with levee, so even the Mac isn’t resistant to the itchy fingers of an impatient Unix programmer.)

  6. What do you mean by “cost-effective”? Do you mean in terms of reduced operating costs vs. increased purchase price? Over what time period?

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