I'll bet that most of the time your "SUV" is a single occupant vehicle driving on city roads. With all this wasteful energy use it is no wonder the American economy is crashing.

My Prius uses Pirelli P4's sized P195/65 R15, so they aren't that skinny...they wouldn't look out of place in any other car of its size. They are a decent all around tire, and not the hard "eco" tire that you caricature.

I drive a 2010 Prius. The power is quite acceptable. I actually spun my wheels the other day on wet roads when starting hard from a light. I am able to accelerate safely on freeways, and I can easily cruise at 85 mph if I want (though the fuel economy obviously drops). The other day, I gave the accelerator a kick to get across a changing yellow, and the acceleration was quite good.

The main thing you have to get used to in a Prius is that the engine speed is dependent almost completely on how hard you press the accelerator, and not on how fast the wheels are spinning. This means that you don't get that same increasing engine pitch on accelerating that you do on cars without a continuously variable transmission. This might give some the impression that acceleration isn't taking place, until you look at your speedometer and realize you are going quite fast. I have gotten used to it now, and it seems natural to me.

The main thing that sold me on the Prius, apart from the fuel economy (which has been 50+mpg by the way) is the durability. I spoke with a cab driver in my area who drove his 2008 Prius for 500000 miles without any significant problems...only brakes and similar things. No new battery. No engine troubles. Nothing. He said he would still be driving it if there weren't regulations on the age of taxis in our area.

Fair enough, but you are in the minority.

Einstein, 1952

Ummmm...yeah. That's called evolution.

I have noticed over the past few years that ants in my area have "learned" to avoid consuming Raid borax laced syrup. I remember early on in my house that ants would feast on the stuff, sucking large drops dry in a matter of minutes. Now, the new ants crawl up to the syrup I have left, seem to probe it, and then run away quickly. Even if I applied the syrup to an established ant pathway, they go around the drops without consuming any of it. I don't know whether they are averse to eating the sugar, or whether they can somehow sense the borax in the syrup. There seems to be some evolution going on here.

Those who would trade their freedom for security deserve neither freedom nor security.

Ben Franklin

When I was a teenager, the father of a wealthy school friend won a hovercraft in a card game. It looked quite similar to the one above. It was powered by a Bombardier snow mobile engine and was extremely loud. It would only hover when the fan was running, as the airstream for the hovering air came from a diverted stream of about 1/3rd of the prop wash air. Steering it felt a lot like trying to push one of those Ikea shopping carts that has four pivoting wheels...during a turn, you end up going sideways for a time. Going over water, it felt not unlike being on a loud boat or a seadoo. Going over land, it felt like being on a loud ground vehicle. The cool part came when we could drive it over a mud flat which alternated between sand and water. It really was an unusual sensation. The problem was that it ate fuel like crazy. It was far worse than a regular boat. The other problem was that when it came to a rest, the sand started to grind down the bottom. We did mitigate this by adding some fiberglass enforced wooden rails. Overall, it was great fun as a teenager, but even if I had the money to dump on such a toy, I doubt I would.

I have an hypothesis:

# of libertarian slashdot posters = k / (average software developer salary)

where k is some real number.

This guy built a self-driving car powered by an android phone and a laptop. He did something similar with a raspberry pi in place of the phone. I find this fascinating. In essence, he taught the car to drive by driving it around a black track delineated by white boundaries, with the computer recording a basic video of his driving technique. The neural network was then trained to drive like a human. The neural network ideas were contained in this free Stanford Machine Learning Course by Andrew Ng. It would be unbelievably cool to me if someone could make this technology more accessible to a wider audience.

People said that about the Toyota Prius. And yet, I recently talked to a taxi driver who drove his Prius for 500 000 miles with no problems other than regular maintenance such as brake replacement. The Prius electric motor takes the stress off the gasoline motor during startup, reducing wear. And the battery is aggressively kept at an optimal charge level (60 to 80% I think). BTW, I am also a Prius owner, and I like the car a lot.

Again, the above is a perfect example of bullshit, or if you want a more polite term, "poppycock" or "humbug". Quoting from the above link...

"bullshit" can be sometimes be distinguished from lying...

The parent poster seems to implicitly (and deliberately?) confuse climate and weather. There are numerous quality discussions about chaotic systems, the differences between climate and weather, and how climate is predictable farther into the future than weather. The existence of these arguments, and the poster's seeming ignorance of them seems to indicate to me that the poster simply does not care about the truth, but cares rather only to appear to be truthful to those less well-read in science. As such, he falls nicely under Princeton Professor Harry Frankfurt's definition of a bullshiter given in his 2005 monograph 'On Bullshit':

What about ROUS's?

It is a derogatory term for a despicable practice.