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Buying a brand new car is almost never about money, and extremely rarely about getting good gas mileage. Those factors definitely influence things, but its a lot more complex... Mostly its all about what the owner to be wants, and their perceived 'needs'. Cars these days aren't built to meet needs, they're built to meet wants.
I bought my Prius for a bunch of reasons (in no particular order):
1) it got better mileage than my Matrix that it replaced
2) it is technologically geeky and I like that
3) it is ridiculously easy to get really good mileage
4) it is more luxurious than my Matrix was
5) at the time, with the miles that were being put on the car (35k/yr), the extra couple thousand for the car made sense as I was saving over $300/yr in fuel, the ROI was there in the used market
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