Agreed. My father, though not always a penny-pincher, embraced and supported the idea that he was a penny-pincher, of sound budgetary mind, and so forth. He bou

Agreed. My father, though not always a penny-pincher, embraced and supported the idea that he was a penny-pincher, of sound budgetary mind, and so forth. He bought a second-generation Prius not because of any environmental benefit (or not entirely: he had at that point worked in oil for 20 years, and still does), but because to him it showed off to the other folks in traffic "Gaze upon my daily fuel savings, ye mighty, and despair!"