Times they are a-changin'

I met a Prius on my way home tonight that was being used for drivers training. Really?! A Prius? Grown adults can barely drive those cars (ahem-- you know who you are!) let alone a 15-year-old kid! You've got to be kidding me! Are school districts taking my taxpayer money and buying robots for cars to be used for drivers training????? What happened to driving a nice, normal GASOLINE powered car? These cars have batteries the size of a human being, touch screen dashboards and every other nuisance distraction that brand new driver should not be dealing with. Do they really need to have a dust and pollen filtration system when they are learning how to drive? What kind of a person would want to train a new driver in one of these cars, anyway? You have to jump through hoops, know special codes and have your fingerprints identified just to start the car. Well, maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but really-- a Prius for drivers ed????!
When I took drivers education, I drove a Malibu, a nice normal American-made car. No over-sized batteries, no touch screens and nothing voice-activated. "Hybrid" and "efficient" weren't listed in the feature and specs for this car, or any other car out driving the roads at that time. I run the risk of dating myself, but we barely had cars with remote keyless entry, let alone cars that ran solely from battery power!
Seeing a Prius being used for drivers ed training made me slightly annoyed. What happened to training in a normal sedan? The majority of kids will never drive anything with a touch screen and a pollen filtration system for years and years to come, so why start them now?