Make Your Own Market

When we got our Prius, there was some discussion on the blog here about whether we could use the carpool lanes. Ultimately, California decided to allow the Prius and some other qualifying hybrids in the carpool lanes. However, they limited the number of cars to 75,000, and it was first-come-first-serve to obtain the stickers you put on your car to show you're legal. That wasn't an issue until the number of qualifying cars exceeded the 75,000 allotment. A guy told me today about the deal he got on a 2005 Prius, the price for which was surprisingly close to a new one. Why? Because it came with carpool stickers. Apparently those stickers are worth somewhere between $2,000-4,000 on the used car price. Sigh. We never got the stickers because we don't drive use the car for commuting where there are carpool lanes, and because we figured: why deprive someone who could actually benefit from it.