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Model-T (as in Toyota) :: 12.07.2007

A great deal has changed since Henry Ford upped production of the Model-T in 1915, selling over half a million copies for $350 each. He quipped that you could have it any color, "so long's it's black."
The protean cars were just what most people needed at the time, whereas most other extravagant offerings on the market were exactly what most people didn't need.
It's almost a hundred years since the Model-T hit the streets, and Toyota is now the world's largest auto-maker, by volume of cars sold. The Camry is its top seller, its bread and butter, but the hybrid models leaving showrooms from both Toyota and its luxury brand Lexus have garnered fame and treasure for the Japanese automaker (which despite corporate offices in Japan outsources production of several models to the US).
Maybe it's just that I live in a University town, but the Prius, Toyota's least expensive hybrid offering, ubiquitously inhabits the teeming metropolis of New Haven. It is not uncommon to see three or four parked adjacently, and with their crisp but modest styling, muted color tones, and near silent operation, they could just be the automotive incarnations of Tibetan monks meditating at curbs and slowly pardoning their way through traffic. Did I mention they are slow? My dad bought one a couple of years ago, and my brother and I decided to drive it briefly with the aim of achieving the worst possible mileage. To no avail. With its conical (one gear) transmission, certainly a great engineering achievement (something Buick and Saab both tried decades ago) it "couldn't pull the wings off a fly." No amount of stomping on the throttle could get it to misbehave. The automotive equivalent of a Macintosh, it shrouds its technical wizardry under a gloss of urban chic: the interior features high quality materials far superior to that of most cars in its price category (Toyota rightly anticipated that socially conscious people with money would be cross shopping the car with cars twice its price), and to induce the computer-like "whir" of a startup, you need only depress a shallow round power button. Nothing mechanical here.
The Prius is not a terribly expensive car, by US standards. Accessible to most, and appealing to the Apollonian side of most, it strongly resonates with the appeal of the original T. Toyota has revolutionized many aspects of car production, just as Henry Ford did a century ago, and the Prius and T embody the same sort of optimism, egalitarianism, and just plain modesty.

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