I am not one of those people who sit around rooting for product recalls. That’s because those people don’t exist. But I got excited when Toyota recalled the 2010 Prius. It’s not that I dislike the Prius. My lovely wife Cassandra has one, and it is an excellent vehicle. Except for its need to constantly tell you how excellent it is. There’s a screen in the center of the dashboard with an animation that shows how much energy the car is recycling as you drive it. If one of your employees were really efficient but throughout the day kept standing up in his cubicle and yelling, “I am really efficient!” you would fire him. Or punch him in the steering wheel. The car on Knight Rider wasn’t as arrogant as the Prius. You know why Priuses don’t make any noise? Because they’ll only talk to other Priuses.
When we moved to Los Angeles five years ago, Cassandra bought her first car ever — a totally badass 2005 black Ford Mustang with silver stripes. She looked like Starsky, if Starsky were hot and a woman and drove really nervously. The only bad thing about the car was that she spent a lot of time talking to young Mexican men at traffic lights. But two years ago, she inexplicably decided that she didn’t trust Ford and wanted to get rid of the car before something went wrong. So she bought a used Prius — which now has something wrong with it. The problem is that I can’t rub this in, because she won’t acknowledge it. I forward her every article about the car’s problems, but she keeps saying, “It’s fine!” as if this were some kind of Salem witch trial for liberals. Even though Toyota’s website says to immediately remove the driver’s-side floor mat because the accelerator can get stuck, she won’t do it. In a car we drive our baby in. This is a woman who won’t give our son nonorganic blueberries.
Admitting there’s a problem with her Prius would imply there’s something imperfect about her entire Whole Foods lifestyle. The Prius has made her feel so superior that, when I drive it, she tells me I’m driving it wrong. My primitive method of accelerating to speed up and braking to slow down does not maximize miles per gallon, as she can show me on an annoying bar graph on that center screen. Prius owners work very hard to get as many miles per gallon as they can to win a game they like to call Getting in an Accident While Staring at a Screen with a Dumb Graphic. Prius owners act as if for every mile they drive, they prevent a coral reef from turning into a tidal wave that will hit Manhattan. Even though I drive a tiny Mini Cooper, I have been subtly shamed by all my friends in Los Angeles, a town that is one big river of Priuses. On Friday, I was shocked when a friend came over to dinner and he wasn’t driving a Prius. It turned out he was driving his converted 1980s Mercedes that runs on vegetable oil and had left his wife’s Prius at home. Nearly every time we drive Cassandra’s metallic-green Prius, at some point we are either behind or in front of another metallic-green Prius. There are three Priuses on my tiny cul-de-sac. If this brake problem isn’t repaired quickly, my neighborhood is about to be jammed up by some ugly Prius-on-Prius violence.
The worst thing about the Prius is that it has given people in Hollywood a way out of the natural order of status competition. If you want your friends and associates to think you’re more successful than you are, you should have to waste $130,000 on a Maserati. These days, no one owns any other kind of hybrid, because you can’t tell from a distance that they’re hybrids. If GM made a car shaped like a crying planet, it could give our government all its money back. For a while, Prius drivers in L.A. even got to park at meters without paying and drive in the carpool lane without a passenger. You don’t get to drive in the carpool lane without a passenger the day you give blood. You could save every child in Haiti, and you would still have to feed the parking meter. And yet we could not thank Prius owners enough for their sacrifice in driving a really nice car that costs less to fill up. If Mel Gibson had been in a Prius, the cops would have set up a motorcade for him to weave behind and yell out his window about the Jews.
I’m hoping that the Prius malfunctions don’t lead to accidents, because the odds are I’d get run over. But I also hope they point out to Prius owners that their lives aren’t perfect. So for now, I’m going to make fun of how their vehicles of the future can’t figure out how brakes work. The only thing better than this would be if they recalled yoga.
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