Trellis coded vector quantization is known to offer a good rate-distortion performance, but at a considerable (and sometimes prohibitive) complexity cost. We present design techniques for vector quantizers with highly symmetric codebooks that facilitate low complexity quantization as well as partitioning into equiprobable sets for trellis coding. The quantization performance of this coder on the Laplacian source matches the performance of trellis based scalar-vector quantization, the best fixed-wordlength quantizer thus far reported, but requires less computational complexity. Furthermore, this coder is well-suited for use in joint source/channel coding systems where the codeword locations and labeling are chosen to minimize the effects of channel errors.