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Say what you will of the knife-edge styling that plagued Pontiacs of the late 1990s, but I really liked the styling of the first-generation Vibe - it was sharp, it was (surprisingly) clean, and the result was a five-door hatch that had some sport to it. I can't say the same for the new car. Designers seemed to keep some of the sharp lines of the original, but they inexplicably added rotund forms for no real reason. It's not the Aztek, mind you, but it's not the sharp, sporty little thing I once admired.

No shoes were flung when the 2010 Toyota Prius debuted at the recent Detroit auto show. Considering the grim mood in the Motor City - with domestic automakers on death watch and frozen credit paralyzing sales - and the fact that a gallon of gas costs little more than a can of beer, that's remarkable. Detroit was hardly the opportune place for a fuel-scrimping, technically advanced Asian import to bow. Then again, consider the Latin meaning of the word Prius: to go before. Defying skeptics is this car's cause. The Prius's mission has always been venturing ahead of the gas-saving, earth-hugging curve.

So, I'm afraid I'm one of those people to whom our design editor, Robert Cumberford, refers in his column this month (page 16). You see, since I drove the new Insight in Arizona in early December, I've been telling my colleagues that Honda "copied the Prius" for the design of its new, second-generation Insight. Although I certainly defer to Cumberford's erudition (the man is a walking, talking encyclopedia of automotive history, especially as it pertains to car styling) and his assertion that designs for both the Prius and the Insight are in fact informed by research conducted in Germany some seven decades ago, I will still state this obvious fact: since its debut five years ago, the second-generation Prius has become the definitive shape for a hybrid car in America. It's little surprise, then, that Honda chose to ape the Prius's basic exterior design and packaging philosophy. After all, the first-generation Insight, which debuted in 1999, was an oddity: a tiny, side-skirted, skinny-tired two-seater that even fervent Honda fans could not wrap their heads around. Lesson learned, Honda wanted its new, second-generation Insight to be friendly rather than freaky, useful rather than nearly useless, and, most important, a sales winner. So, like both the existing Prius and the all-new, 2010 model seen in the following pages, the Insight is an aerodynamically optimized, four-door, five-passenger hatchback sedan.

Can one million owners be wrong? Not likely, and that's why engineers were careful in creating the 2010 Toyota Prius. Toyota's honed its recipe for a successful hybrid sedan over the past ten years, and there's little need to stray wildly from it - some slight refinements are all that's needed.