It’s all about money. I don’t want $600-700/mo. payments on a car. The majority of the people in this country make about $40k/yr. The last thing anyone wants is 25-30% of their monthly income tied up in a car payment, gas and insurance.

Like I said, I would have bought a Fusion if it wasn’t some crazy $30,000+. When I went to the Ford dealer to even test drive one, they didn’t have a single one on the lot. They told me that they have them pre-sold. I guess that’s to all of the people who like blowing their money rather than investing it.

A car is just to get from A to B. I can carry 4 people, groceries and lots of other things exactly the same as a Fusion can. 95% of the time it’s just me driving by myself, as it is for most people. Nobody needs to carry 3500 lbs of metal just to get back and forth to work. Lots of people have Insights and are happy with them. I can take the same path you do to work every single day and not have any problems.

Maybe you make $60-150k/yr and a Fusion is fine for you. But for the rest of us poor folks or people who don’t want to squander their money foolishly, an Insight does just fine.

Just because you have the money doesn’t mean you need to spend it all. With the stock market in the tank, now is the time to be investing to take advantage of these bad times. The more money you spend on a car, the less money you’ll have to invest. The car is just a depreciating asset. It’s foolish to spend a lot of money it as you’ll be lucky to get 50% of what you paid in 3 years if you go to trade in. I plan on getting my money’s worth out of this car and keep it for 10-15 years.

That $10,000 you save on an Insight over a Fusion can be invested for 20 years and be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars later in for retirement.

I’d be better off spending $18,000 on a car that gets 30 MPG vs. $30,000 on a car that gets 41 MPG.

The car makers all need to focus on building $15,000 hybrid cars. That would make sense to frugal people. I bought my Insight because I remember paying $50 to fill up my Saturn Ion that I had in the past and it made me sick to pay $50 bucks to barely drive 275-300 miles. If gas prices rose again to when I was paying up to $4.25/gallon where I lived, with the Insight I’d be spending $35-38 to drive 400-450 miles. My cars always get horrible gas mileage in the bad city stop and go traffic. I’m rarely on the highway, so all of these cars talking about big highway numbers means nothing to me. Lots of GM cars advertise 30-33 MPG. I would never experience that with my driving. Both of my cars gas mileage dropped almost 50% when I moved from the country to the city. I was getting over 30 MPG in both vehicles in the country and then they both dropped to 16-18 MPG. I got tired of having to fill the tank every 2 to 4 days and that’s why I bought the Insight. It fit the bill for the money. The Prius or Fusion Hybrid would have fit the bill just as nicely, but both of them would give me $150-300/mo. higher payments than I’m paying now.

And with the economy and unemployment being as bad as it is, I am amazed at the people who are going into massive debt for such expensive cars. That seems very foolish. Just because you have a good paying job today doesn’t guarantee that you’ll have it tomorrow. In December 2009, look how 80,000+ people got the pink slip. That’s just plain scary.

And there goes the problem with the Insight; where as there are a lot of things that the Fusion does better than the Prius, there is nothing that the Insight does better than the Prius on.