During my Great Prius Hunt, I joined several web forums to try and pick up leads and get advice. I noticed that a lot of the discussions ended up resembling the Monty Python "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch... SFGuy14: Lovely car, the Prius. Of course, it wasn't easy to buy one. carguy30: No, and a lovely car because it's hard to buy one. mpg55plus: I remember waiting 8 months for my dealer to get my Prius. green14: Ha! You were lucky. It took my dealer 6 months to get me on the waiting list, and then I had to wait another 12 months. carguy30: But we were happy to wait. SFGuy14: Yes, we were...but when my Prius came in the dealer sold it to someone else, and made me start waiting all over again. mpg55plus: You got off lightly. When my Prius turned up at the dealership, it only had three wheels. green14: What, three wheels? Luxury. Our Prius had no wheels. We had to carry it home on our backs and wait for the wheels to be shipped to us. And we had to pay extra for the shipping. SFGuy14: We had to pay extra, and we had to give the dealer a non-refundable deposit of $4000 in small unmarked bills in a brown envelope. carguy30: At least you only had to pay extra. My Toyota dealer wouldn't let me take delivery until he'd slept with my wife. mpg55plus: I've met your wife and that's a bargain. SFGuy14: Well, here in California it's not that easy to get a Prius. My dealer made me toss his salad. carguy30: Made you what? mpg55plus: Right... let's see... My great grandfather put me on the waiting list to get on the Prius waiting list just after Otto Benz invented the 4-stroke internal combustion engine in 1867. After that I had to wait four years and pay a non-refundable bribe of half a kilo of finest Columbian. A year after that when the car arrived, it said "batteries not included", so I had to buy 1,000 nickel metal hydride batteries at Radio Shack and fit them myself. And when I took delivery of the car, the dealer gave me a golden shower. green14: Yeah, and you tell people you went through all that to get a midsize car, and they call you a lunatic.
