Oh wow-ee, a V8 Mustang! a new El Camino! a new Dodge Challenger! a new C(n+1) Corvette! How innovative! Ooh, ooh, looka there, if you give some Italians a half million dollars they'll make you a super nice luxury GT in fire-engine red, who'd ever have imagined they could do that? Oh boy, the thousandth iteration of another ridiculously overpowered V8 sports sedan with not a single speck of design in it (excepting the stereo system and sat nav) that wasn't in mass production thirty or forty years ago is so awesomely exciting!!!1!

Yeah (yaaaawn) sure. You suckers wouldn't know a really slick piece of modern engineering if it bit you on the ass. Look at the Prius's exotic three-way transmission, or its bizarro Atkinson-cycle engine, or its regenerative braking, or its drivetrain-control electronics if you want to see a few things you won't find all over 1960s and 70s back issues of Road-n-Track and Car-n-Driver. Nor are these hand-built one-of-a-kind prototypes that cost more than your house, so you can only look at them from afar, but all that badass technology is packed in a mass production car at a price Joe Median can actually afford to buy and drive himself. And oil is $120 a barrel

and it's there to stay, too, yet still all you guys can do is dis, dis, dis Toyota.

The stupidest part of the argument is how it's not enough for Toyota to have designed and built and promoted and mass-produced the Prius, no! - where, because millions upon millions of teevee-addicted Americans insist on buying three-ton V8 pickup trucks and SUVs primarily to carry one (1) person from suburbia to office parking lot and back, Toyota, a car manufacturer, is to be censured without cease for not righteously refusing all their nasty, eco-unfriendly trade. Better that the tainted profits to be extracted from all those blockheads should go exclusively to all the other car manufacturers who for decades refused to even consider making any high-quality, high-tech, high-mileage cars at all.