My fiance has a 2003 Lexus ES. I have been having fun telling him that my car has this and my car has that. He only has 2 things I wish the Prius had....heated seats and memory seats. Besides that...I have keyless go, voice activated nav (he jast has regular nav), control buttons on the stearing wheel and quite a few other things that so far you can only get on the LS 430. He says that now he has to go out and get the LS since my car is better! :lol: I am not complaing mind you, but why does the prius have all this cool stuff?
Because Toyota has been very smart in the way it is marketing the Prius. They, unlike Honda, have realized that it is not sufficient to market the car for its fuel efficiency and environmental benefits. By comparison, Honda's Insight is a car with one great advantage (better gas mileage than the Prius) but the serious drawback of being impractical for most American drivers, and Honda's hybrid Civic is a car that, aside from its fuel consumption, is just an ordinary, normal, i.e., unexciting car. The Prius, on the other hand, has been designed to be an attractive choice even aside from the remarkable engineering achievement of its hybrid drive train. See also my comments elsewhere about next year's Hylander: focusing first on the high-end market, hiding the currently-high costs of the hybrid, "you can have it all" marketing, blah blah blah.
My sister has a Lexus. She is, shall we say, "large", and finds the Lexus to be more comfortable. I, on the other hand, who am not "large", find the Prius, at half the price, to be extremely comfortable, and I love the geek-factor and the Kermit-factor of the Prius. My sister cares about nothing, in a car, except comfort for her bulk. She would not be at all happy in a Prius. This car is not for everyone. Now, if hybrids got to use the HOV lane in California, my sister would buy the hybrid Lexus the minute it comes out.
