"So a Camry, a Prius, and a Corvette drive onto a racetrack—" Why are you laughing? This isn't a joke.

Photo: Toyota USA Newsroom.

Seriously. The above headline is not a setup for some kind of corny car-guy punchline. It's for real. And let me preface this by saying that I'm not a Toyota basher at all. In fact, I own a Toyota.

That said, I do share a certain level of the sensibility of many in the automotive press—among them Todd Deeken and Paul Schmucker of Everyday Driver, for instance—that the Toyota Camry and Toyota Prius can be looked at as archetypes of the "appliance on wheels" concept.