I am hoping to get a Prius someday, but I've only had my car for about a year and a half. Are the controls weird? I remember something about a lever on the dash that looks like an emergency brake but isn't.

Yes, the controls are a bit weird (to the point where they give you a booklet of instruction sheets for valets).

The lever on the dash is actually the same purpose as the wheel or console lever in an automatic: you can move from park to reverse, neutral, or drive. There's a "braking" mode (for more engine breaking, vaguely analogous to lower gears on a traditional automatic) and there's a seperate button for "park". But other than that, you can mostly treat it as an automatic.

The only other control hiccup is that lots of functions can only be accessed through the screen display. Some things that makes sense, but having climate controls being purely "virtual" is a bit of a pain.

I'm still very happy with it though. And when you get your hybrid in a few years, the tech will only be better. :)

60/51 mpg from a 1.5L displacement four-wheel vehicle.

*cries*

my 0.996L two wheel vehicle gets 36/42 (worse in winter).

on the other hand, it gets 110hp out of that one liter, and weighs just 500 lb. wheee!