Gas prices will have to go up a lot to make a Prius make sense from a purely economical point of view. Some friends and I ran the numbers a couple of years ago when gas was around $4/gallon, and at that price you only broke even on the Prius versus buying a non-hybrid similar vehicle at something like 230,000 miles. If you don't drive the car that far, unless gas gets really quite expensive, you'd be better off buying a non-hybrid.

I have hopes that someday this type of car will be reasonably priced, but not yet. Even the Chevy Volt that's due out, which looked really good on paper, is going to cost > $40,000, and it's essentially a chevy sedan; in a standard car you wouldn't even want to pay $20K for it.