My next car is going to get 40-50MPG and cost less than two years of my salary. And I won't look like a douche bag (borrowing your word) driving it. The more I think of it, as you and other people are saying, the cars are the loss-leader for the solar and battery plants. The Powerwall is the one thing he is behind that has me VERY excited. The power out here sucks, it is so terribly bad. I get brownouts daily, and the incoming power is anywhere from 110V to 125V as I monitor the incoming to the PC's. The Powerwall would be a great way to run my house for a day or two after the next power outage and act as a whole-house UPS.
$169 a month. Honestly? I think I probably would go with a lease on an electric car because the charging technology and the batteries themselves are tied to Moore's Law. You really will take a bath on the resale value of a used electric car and you're far better off just getting a newer one under contract for now. And for Californicators, it was even sweeter for a while. There used to be a company or two offering whole-house UPS. Looking it up now, it appears they still are... but their websites haven't been updated in five or six years. I'd totally go that way - I've bought a few gadgets with switching supplies that got cooked by shitty power.
LOL, no. I sat in one of those and took it on a 10 minute test drive. I'm a bigger guy; I have wide shoulders and a size 14 wide foot. (The mini was so small that my feet smothered the gas and brake pedals at the same time no matter how I sat in the car.) I looked like there should be 10-12 more clowns coming out behind me. The two friends who tagged along with me did not stop laughing for about two hours after the test drive. I'm looking at a Prius V (the wagon) and a Mazda 3 5-door. Reading up on the Ford C-Max, I may have to go try one on and see how I fit inside the thing as the new iteration is a lot more reliable and getting better reviews. I need a hatchback to fit in the garage, I need something big enough to transport the telescope and I need something that gets at least 35MPG to do better than what I have now. My credit union has approved me for a .80% new car loan if I get a car before the end of the year, so I may have to jump on that before the rate hike. The current 12 year old car is still running fine and I hate car payments, so I am trying to keep the existing running. One of the things that really brings these types of discussions home is to talk about a few of my coworkers. They commute 70-100 miles per day to work, five days a week. One drives a Tahoe, one drives an Excursion(!), and another drives an F150. Each of these gets 12-15MPG for what amounts to a basic commuter car. Buying a new Prius in each of these three cases would save them enough gas every month to make the car payment, probably lower their insurance (multi car discounts) and make us that much less dependent on fossil fuels. How many other people are doing this? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? The idea of Tesla and pure electric cars is amazing and I support it 100%. The reality is, however, that replacing thousands of sub-twenty MPG commuter cards with 30-40MPG cars would do so much more right now toward global warming, dependency on the middle east and pollution. For the same 130K for a Tesla, all three of these people could move to a commuter car saving 110+ gallons of gas a month each. Now, if I win the lottery, I'm getting a model X because TECHNOLOGY FUCK YEA. And 100% agree with you on the leasing of any pure electric car. If something weird comes up in those two years or the weather screws up the LiOn cells and you turn the car in to be someone else's headache.
One of my heartbreaking moments of auto enthusiasm was discovering that not only can I not work the clutch in a Lotus Esprit because my legs are too long, but that the act of getting into and out of an Elise gives me a charley horse. I've loved that damn Esprit since frickin' For Your Eyes Only. So I feel ya. Now that you mention it, my attempts to get into a Fiat 500 were similarly comical. Friend has a Prius V. She loves it. They seem to be great beasties. Priuses, of course, are like belly buttons around here; everybody has one. I wouldn't worry too much about a rate hike. The Fed are a bunch of pussies and in the past week they slinked back from "mmmaybe 12 basis points" to "mmmmaybe early 2016." as far as your numbers... mk - where on the map is "a slightly less esoteric dialect of markup?"The Department of Transportation also reported that the average fuel efficiency of trade-ins was 15.8 mpg (miles per gallon), compared to 24.9 mpg for the new cars purchased to replace them, translating to a 58% fuel efficiency improvement.
I already know when they are going to raise rates. The week before my adjustable mortgage is recalculated in 2016. Because that is how luck works out. Funny story saying that. I got an adjustable rate 15 year loan when I refinanced for 3.75%. Going with an adjustable, the Credit Union ate the filing fees and saved me about $2000 in costs. If the rates jump the max they are allowed to, over the life of the loan, I break even off a fixed rate loan. The Prius V is looking like the winner. The only bad thing I hear about them is that if you load them full of gear and/or people they are hogs without a lot of power to spare. Then again I heard the same thing about the original Prius as well. I'm at that age where all I want a car to do is to go from A to B and save me money on insurance and gas. If I get the urge to drive something more exciting, I can rend something and go get it out of my system. I've never been in an Elise, but I have driven a Mazda RX8. I squeezed into the thing and about 20 minutes later realized I was doing 100MPH on a windy back-road, and if I got used to this I'd have to pay a few dozen speeding tickets a year.
Pretty much anything without a V8 is going to suffer under overloading and pretty much anything with a V8 is gonna get shitty gas mileage. I hope to never be "at that age." My daily driver is a dodge stealth in ticket-me red, and has been for... shit. 12 years now.
Oh neat. I have a PC that is worth more than most people's car. I also have optical gear worth more than most people's car come to think of it. I was never a car guy; I can appreciate the tech involved but never got into them for some reason.I hope to never be "at that age." My daily driver is a dodge stealth in ticket-me red, and has been for... shit. 12 years now.