They get a big charge out of this

For years, Nancy Mazonson drove an unglamorous minivan, the better to carpool the kids. ''I am someone who never cared about what they drove as long as the car started and took me somewhere," she says.

That was before a funny-looking little hybrid turned her head and captured her heart. Meet the new Nancy Mazonson: ''I love my car. I've never loved a car, ever in my entire life, and I love my car. Who would've thought?"

Like religious converts, Toyota Prius owners are almost evangelical about their cars, particularly now that gas prices have climbed to more than $2 a gallon and show no sign of subsiding. If Prius owners seemed self-righteous before, these days they're downright smug. Websites, blogs, and chat rooms devoted to the gasoline-electric hybrid keep popping up. Prius owners attend Prius rallies. Hollywood stars have flocked to the car as if it's a vat of botox. Last year, Motor Trend named it Car of the Year, the first hybrid to achieve such status.

The federal government is also getting into the act, offering a tax deduction of up to $2,000 for hybrid owners, whose cars use less gas and emit fewer pollutants. And in Massachusetts, the Legislature is considering allowing solo drivers of hybrid cars to use the high-occupancy vehicle lanes on Interstate 93.

There are waiting lists to buy the Prius, even though Toyota has doubled its production for the US market to 100,000 new cars. And don't bother trying to haggle with the dealer: the car is never sold for less than the sticker price of between $21,000 and $26,000. ''We don't discount them because we don't have to," declares Scott Brothers, a sales manager at Clair Toyota in Dedham.

The Prius is not the only hybrid on the market -- Honda has the Civic, Accord, and Insight hybrids. Ford makes a hybrid SUV, and Chevrolet a hybrid pickup. Toyota will roll out the luxury Lexus hybrid soon. Yet more Priuses have been sold than all the rest combined.

But when the Prius first came out, it couldn't find buyers, though in five years it has achieved cult status. One doctor who drives a Prius recently posted a five-page treatise on how to maximize your mileage, broken down into categories such as ''tire and road rolling resistance," ''speed, braking, acceleration and anticipatory driving" and ''weight in vehicle." A Boston-area woman has a link on her home page devoted to her 2001 aqua Toyota Prius. ''The average fill-up occurs every 14 days, after 339.8 miles, requires 7.396 gallons and costs $11.58," she writes on the site. The woman also co-moderates a Prius chat room on yahoo.com.

On another site, priuschat.com, one new owner recently wrote an ode to ''11 days of new Prius bliss." He had waited 10 months for his car and sounded almost like a groom on his honeymoon. ''It's just incredible . . . I've been unilaterally praised for my choice of car by people who know what it is -- and keep in mind that this eastern Iowa community is predominantly not exactly a progressive, forward-thinking place."

But for all the raves, the Prius still makes up a sliver of the automobile market. Its size and design doesn't appeal to some, and its price -- at least $3,000 more than a comparable-size non-hybrid -- is an obstacle to others, who say that gasoline savings still don't justify the cost of the car.

Tarek Hassan, who drives a Hummer, says he would never buy a Prius or any other hybrid. ''They're a different customer from me," says Hassan, who manages The Tannery, a shoe store in Harvard Square. Despite his car's dismal gas mileage -- ''I try to just drive it in the city" -- he loves it for its power and look. ''During that last major snowstorm, when everyone was shoveling out their cars in their parking spaces, I was able to drive my car right out. It was a piece of cake."

But Mazonson and her husband, David Ofsevit, were early Prius devotees, buying a silver blue Prius as soon as they came on the market in autumn 2000. Last October they bought a second Prius to replace their 1999 Dodge Caravan. Ofsevit found a Maine dealership where the wait was only four months. Three months later he got a call: His red Prius had arrived.

Unlike her husband, a high-tech freak, Mazonson isn't into the nuances of how the vehicle splits its time between the gas-powered engine and the electric motor, or the ''kinetic energy recovery." Like so many Prius owners, she feels that her car makes a statement -- something she admits she has always loathed in other car owners.

''It's the thing I always hate about cars, which is that people think they're some sort of statement about themselves," says Mazonson, an occupational therapist who lives in Newton. ''But I actually do feel that way with my car. It's about trying to act on my beliefs, of trying to have a less negative impact on the world . . . to pollute less and consume less oil. I kind of like the idea that I'm in the forefront of something that has the potential to really make a difference."

Less lofty but perhaps more important to many Prius owners is the one-upmanship at the gas pump. The car averages 55 miles per gallon. ''I do feel smug when I'm standing at the gas station," adds Mazonson.

Then there's the hipness factor: ''I've had a lot of kids tell me that this is way cool," she says, ''and at age 52, I have very few ways to be way cool." When she first started driving the old Prius, it was, she says, ''a guy magnet." For a certain type of guy, anyway. ''I would go out, and guys in Subaru Outbacks with Greenpeace stickers and L.L. Bean shirts would come over," she says.

Image-conscious Hollywood types have taken to the Prius like starlets to the red carpet: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ted Turner, Alicia Silverstone, Cameron Diaz, Larry David, Harrison Ford, Billy Crystal, Kevin Bacon, Tim Robbins, and Susan Sarandon all drive a Prius. Political pundit Arianna Huffington, a reformed SUV driver, has been a one-woman billboard for the cars, declaring ''it was love at first drive between me and my dark blue Prius."

No one is more surprised at the success story than Ernie Boch Jr., who says nobody would buy the cars when they first came out. ''Toyota, in the Northeast, had a $1,000 rebate on them, and you still couldn't give the things away," says Boch, whose Norwood dealership is the second largest Toyota seller in the world. In fact, he ended up selling those first 20 Priuses to a dealer in California, where there was a waiting list. Now, Boch often has his own waiting list for the cars.

One of his customers was Boston restaurateur Jasper White, who bought a silver Prius a year ago. ''I love it. It's just a great car," says White. Though he says he's not ''a tree hugging environmentalist," he's happy that it's a clean and cheap car to operate. ''When I fill up, I get 500 miles to the tank, and it costs me $18. With gas prices going up . . . you gotta love that," he says.

Don Leedham of Clair Toyota in Dedham has sold dozens of Priuses since they came out. There's a system to driving the car -- it involves regenerative braking (which charges the batteries that run the electric motor) and coasting -- to maximize its mileage, which is recorded on a dashboard screen. ''It updates you every five minutes and tells you whether you're being a good driver," says Leedham.

Seth Riney runs a livery service in Cambridge called PlanetTran. All five of the cars in his fleet are Priuses. ''We're the first exclusively hybrid livery fleet," he says. ''We market to people who are environmentally conscious." In fact, Riney is certain he obtained a rare livery license in Cambridge only because he was using the hybrid. ''Our goal is to use the most cutting-edge technology that is the cleanest." His sixth Prius will arrive in June.

Ernest and Marilyn Kahn just bought a Prius. ''Our Oldsmobile gets only 17 miles per gallon, and our Camry gets 28. We expect the Prius to give us 60 miles in the city, 50 on the highway," says Ernest Kahn, 78, who lives in Sharon. Unlike standard cars, the hybrid does better in the city, where the electric motor is used more than the gas engine.

It was really his wife who coveted the car. ''The emissions are much, much less, and it saves on gasoline," says Marilyn Kahn, 76. ''In this day and age when gas is close to $2 a gallon, it's exciting."

Ofsevit would fall into the category of Prius geek. He's an Internet sales engineer who seems to know everything about his and Mazonson's two hybrids. ''When you're a technical person like me, it's fun to talk about," he says. Whenever he has a question, he goes into the chat rooms and, invariably, some other geek will have the answer.

Ofsevit is also interested in the geopolitical ramifications of hybrids. ''As someone pointed out, if everyone drove a car that gets 40 miles per gallon, the US wouldn't have to import oil. . . . We could tell the Middle Eastern countries that have us over their knees to go pound sand."

But you don't have to be high tech to love the Prius. As Ray Magliozzi, cohost of Car Talk on WBUR, puts it: ''The brilliance of the Prius is that the electric stuff is completely idiot-proof. You never have to stop at the 7-Eleven and buy them out of D-cells. You get it, you drive it, and bada bing, bada bang, you get 40-plus miles per gallon."