I saw my first Prius out in the wild!

wow your first?

or have you simply not been paying as close attention until your interest in the Prius was manifested?

i guess its possible that there is a Prius void there (well there is a shortage everywhere!) but in my area, i have stopped trying to figure out how many different ones ive seen.

in fact, i've seen one with a custom paint job already. it was bright green. (cool color but not sure i would want to paint a brand new car thou)

also i came home today and there was another Prius in my apartment complex parking lot. it was the mother of one of the renters here ( there is only 11 apartments here) so as you can see, there is a huge amount of them around here.

my dealer told me that they were getting 4-10 every two weeks and the waiting list is so long that they quit taking new names for the list but they have started a "list of interest" this list is for people who want to get on the waiting list when a slot becomes available (the waiting list is over a year long now) but this requires no deposit or paperwork. i guess they realize that many people's situations can change drastically in a year.

 

I still haven't seen any here yet, and I hope I'm the first to have one in my area. It should be here in December.

 

Here in Portland, OR I see at least a couple of them a day. The most I've detected in one day was 7 (not counting the classics).

Esther

 

my record would be hard to say but i did see 5 Prius classics sitting at Hawks Prairie Restaurant. all were city of Seattle transportation vehicles. i question why city of seattle vehicles would be sitting in a restaurant parking lot in Lacey which is 55 miles south of seattle city limits.

 

In the San Francisco area, I see more than 20 a day. No one ever notices mine.

 

There is a ton of them in California, which is why I had to get mine there.

I've still only seen 10 2004 Pri here in Michigan. Today I saw a Salsa Pearl just like mine pulling into Oakland University north of Detroit. It was nice to note that Salsa is by far the best color. I hope you all feel the same way about the color you own, too.

So in the month since I've had mine, I've seen a grand total of three.

Still the rarest production car in Michigan and probably will be for a few more months.

=paul=

 

well in Michigan, i would be surprised to see many Priuses too. after all michigan is the anti-conservation, anti-japanese hotbed of the world. fully ½ of all negative articles written about the Prius was written in the state.

tell me something, how many of the new Ford GT's have you seen??

my sister works at one of the largest Ford dealerships in WA St and they dont even have a license to sell one there.

 

Aside from your anti-Michigan rant Dave, you could substitute any state east of the left coast (did I say that?) and find very few Prius. And I've never seen a Ford GT with my own eyes.

Consider, I had to travel to California, where the vast majority of the Prius cars are delivered and sold, to get one in a timely (four month wait) fashion.

Should you ever venture outside the Starbucks, you might find that Toyota's big engineering, research, and development center is located near Ann Arbor Michigan. That's where the Sienna, Camry, Avalon and Solara design work is done. Toyota wants to expand and cover almost an entire square mile - roughly the size of GM's Tech Center in Warren Michigan, while employing several thousand people.

Michigan is still very involved in manufacturing, but we're far, far from the factory-smoke-belching, polluted river wasteland, that you've been led to believe.

 

Dave, I grew up it Ohio. My Grandparents both came from Detroit and worked for Ford. I went to college in Michigan including a semester at U of M. (4 years at OSU once a year I am conflicted) Some what you say is true but as Einstein said it is all relative. There is some bias more in the past than now. You probably don't want to work at a Ford, GM etc assembly plant and drive a Toyota or at least you didn't want to do that in the near past, and the executives get cars so they don't have to worry, but it ain’t the 60's or even the 70's. You see lots of foreign cars. My daughter works in Columbus and does work for Honda who has 6 plants in Ohio. Fusistance is Retile. Your nice person will be laminated.
to quote a acquittance of ours.

 

i graduated from high school in port huron. i was working and laid of from gm. there is nothing about michigan you can tell me that i dont know. every member of my family with the exception of my dad and one uncle, worked and retired from one of the big 3 automakers.

i stand by everything i said. over half of the articles that were negative concerning the Prius STILL come from Michigan.

the average person there will not buy anything but american no matter how piss poor the product is or how much better their options are. and is it their fault?

no... its not. they are simply a victim of brainwashing orchestrated by a small hand full people living in their ivory towers in bloomfield hills, Grosse Point hills, or one hill or another. it doesnt really matter because if you are from there then you know exactly what im talking about. im talking about executives trying to tell us what is good for america when they are so far removed from what the average american goes through that they congregate in their own opalescence reality clouded as to mask the reality that we have to deal with on a daily basis.

the resistance to change is stronger there than any place i have ever been. i have an uncle, who is bright, inteligent and very very talented mechanic/millwright/fabricator. he can glance at most things and immediately see the weakness in the construction of the item and compromises that were incorporated to make the item a marketable product.

at one time in the recent past he nearly disowned his son in law for buying a toyota and having the nerve to park the car in his driveway.

imho, any dealer would have to have balls to market a Prius in that state. they will have a huge uphill climb. because there, there is no rhyme or reason, just the mantra of the big 3.

 

Dave we can both agree that we love this car although I'm pretty certain we bought it for wildly different reasons.

I'd say as far as your opinions on Michigan (and I assume any part of what used to be called the rust-belt) goes, your mind is pretty well made up by your own experiences. Nobody here will try and change it.

Not me.

Not the dozens of Michgan residents on Prius waiting lists at every dealer.

Not the hundreds of automotive engineers and scientists working on alternative fuel, batteries, and hybrid electric vehicles in Michigan R&D labs.

Not the thousands of stockholders financing that research.

Not the millions of Americans who hope they succeed.

=p=

 

As a fellow Midwesterner all I was saying is that things are slowly changing. What was anathema is now tolerated. I know what can happen to a driver of a non US car in the 60's who tries to park at a Ford assembly plant, they get burned out. But as Toyota and Honda build in the US acceptance is very slowly coming. The guys at the top will get the message when their noses are rubbed in it enough. I just hope there is time for the people to get jobs, there is still a lot of suffering back there.

 

oh i dont think michigan is hopeless by any stretch of the imagination. they excel in many many areas.

they however, are slow to change or adapt in one area and one area only. that is cars.

 

wow, this is soo funny to go back and read

 

You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a half dozen in the Boston area.

 

They were rarer in September of 2004 when the last post was written. One defect of PriusChat is that there is no closure for old threads, so we get zombie threads. (that won't die and eat our brains)