I view an Acura forum on which one of the participants is the used car manager for an Acura dealer. He posted the following:

Today's amusing deal, not at my store tho...friend of mine who is the General Sales Manager at a Toyota store mentioned this. To be fair, they even asked the customer if they were sure they wanted to do this...
Customer has a 2 year old Expedition XLT, 24k miles, leather, moonroof, nice shape, worth about $12k wholesale right now as it does have Nav + RES.

Customer owes, get this, $30,000 or so on it.

Customer decides that they NEED a Prius. Customer wants to go from 15mpg to 40mpg. Customer drives 1k miles per month. At $5/Gallon that means 15mpg is a gas bill of $330 a month versus $125/mo with the Prius.

So they will save $205/mo by buying a Prius, IF GAS WAS $5 A GALLON (It isn't, it's about $3.90 where they are).

Since new Priuses are on the "Wait 6 months to pay $1k+ over sticker" they pay $26,995 and buy an 07 with 26k miles on it.

The Prius only has a retail Value of $23k per NADA (Granted they are doing more than that at auction right now) so the Bank will only loan about $29k on the Prius.

Customer writes a home equity check for the $18k negative equity and finances the Prius.

So, they were paying $500 or so a month to lease the Expedition, now they are paying over $550/mo to buy the Prius. On top of that, they are on, if I heard correctly, a 15 year HELOC at 6.75%. That's $159.28 FOR FIFTEEN YEARS assuming I heard correctly.

So their $500 payment becomes $709.28+ to save $205/mo on gasoline.

We've really started pulling in the reigns across the board. Between gas, food, and saving for heating oil, there is less and less to go around. We have a "date" planned for this weekend as my wife got an end of year gift certificate.
There is little we can do to reduce fuel consumption at this point.