2004 Toyota Prius in Framingham

It's in the air. You can detect it in the popular press and celebrity media. There's a sense these days that in the sophisticated places-London, Hollywood, Ann Arbor-you're not really making the scene if you aren't green. In Europe, they've got the highly conspicuous Smart city car and a host of other micro-machines to prance around in to show that their hearts are in the right place. But here at home, there can be no better way to alert the world to the fact that you're green like money than with the new Toyota Prius gas-electric hybrid. Prius might almost rhyme with pious, but that's OK, brother, because you're religious in your zeal to conserve fuel and cut emissions, are you not? Or perhaps Your Righteous Dudeness would prefer to go green more subtly, facing down global warming with the sonorous turbo-diesel sounds of the extraordinarily abstemious Volkswagen Jetta TDI?

Fact is, home could be Graceland, and your other car might be a Hummer, but as far as the beautiful people are concerned, nothing says you're a dear old friend of Mother Earth more conspicuously than a car that can get 40 to 50 mpg or more. Any additional benefit from its thrift accruing to your selfish cheapskate side is a bonus-as is the underlying quality of these automobiles, which is considerable but more or less on top of the major environmental-status points they will win you. (Contrast this with the embarrassing, golf-cart-like GEM electric cars that some prominent Californians have let themselves be photographed in.... Read full article