Conspicuous Conservation

"If you know what you're looking at and you know what it is, then you know what you get."
That was the jist of Toyota's premise when designing the "Pious" and in practical terms, it translates to the fact that if you see a Prius, you can automatically identify it as one and thus know that it's a hybrid, whilst the same doesn't happen with the Honda Civic or the Ford "what'sisname" (A: Escape), whose hybrid versions a have the same look as the conventional ones.

Q: So how much of an influence was this design thing to the Prius' success?

In 1899, economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined the term "Conspicuous consumption", to depict the behavioral characteristic of the nouveau riche and in this context the application of the term should be narrowed to the elements of the upper class who use their enormous wealth to manifest social power, whether real or perceived. Or in the case of those who bought 1st class tickets for the Titanic, plain unlucky!

I can feel the question popping in your head: "Wait, what? 1899?". Bear with me.

If you're not wealthy, what is the other way to attain social power? Moral high ground, anyone?

Since Mr. Gore (yep, the very same, the one who married that lady/paladin for the "banning of heavy metal concerts in the US" crusade!!) won the Nobel ticket for that non-political, 100% scientifically accurate, and not at all meant with an hidden agenda documentary, "beeing green" is on the forefront of the conquest for moral high ground.

Cars are generally considered to be the low-hanging fruit, when we talk about signalling social status and  having a Rolls-Royce is clearly a sign that you're filthy rich. But if wealth is not the issue and you wanted to signal your neighbours that you're green, what car would you buy? Probably one that has a higher fuel endurance. Probably an affordable hybrid. Probably an affordable hybrid that can be identified as one by my neighbours. Definitely a Prius!!!

.Economists Steven E. Sexton and his sister Alison, use the term Conspicuous Conservation for this phenomenon and wrote an amazing paper on this issue: "Conspicuous Conservation: The Prius Effect and Willingness to Pay for Environmental Bona Fides" (follow the link to download it free and legally). I recommend this, but for those of you who are not much into reading economics papers, there's also the Freakonomics podcast about it here.