Auto Purchase and Lessons Learned
By John Taylor; 2009 April 16, Jalal 07, 166 BE
In Which I Purchase a Car
I just bought a new used car, a black 2000 Toyota Echo. With it I plan to pursue my new hobbies, ecomodding and hypermiling. These activities are so new that nobody I have met so far, no matter how knowledgeable they are about cars, has ever heard of them. So I will explain. Ecomodding is making modifications to the car in order get the maximum possible fuel economy out of it, and hypermiling is improving your driving style in such a way as to extend the mileage even further.
My choice of automobile was guided by the shared experience of the pioneers of this sport at ecomodder.com, a site which I visited frequently during my search. I came close to buying their automobile of choice, a Honda Civic Hatchback made between 1992 and 1995, which has a VTEC-e engine -- the "e" stands for economy, meaning that with proper coaxing it can pop into a lean burn condition. This car gets better mileage than anything coming off assembly lines today, including most hybrids. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any of this model car around here that were not rusting away, or that would not have required a great deal of work, including engine transplants.
My second choice, the Echo, is a better one in many ways, since it is newer and therefore less subject to the bane of cars around here, rust. Also it has a small 1.4 litre engine which impressed my mechanic with its peppiness, and its body has the lowest drag coefficient of any car ever designed, with only a handful of exceptions. Because of its reputation for reliability the Echo is relatively rare, in demand and commands a premium. The car I eventually bought was sold by an individual advertising on Kajiji, and was half the price of the cheapest I had seen. I took a risk buying it without a safety certificate and unexamined by a mechanic. Fortunately the seller turned out to be honest and all that was wrong was just what he had said, a bad front wheel bearing. Just to be safe I had both front wheel bearings replaced, influenced by my father's often repeated story of how one day long ago he was rounding a left turn at a stoplight and both front wheels buckled and all but fell off. The car sunk, hit the ground and scraped along the ground in a shower of sparks.
"If I had been going at highway speed, I would have been dead. You do not fool with wheel bearings."
The kids had their hearts set on a yellow Mazda hatchback being sold at a local dealer for twice the price of this Toyota, which they called the "yellow bee." I came within an ace of buying it, but the dealer refused to take my mechanic's advice and lower the price enough to cover two needed tires. So I walked. Nine-year-old Thomas was, after much protest, finally won over to this black one by the "secret" passage into the trunk that Japanese sedans have, by simply folding down the rear seats.
I was put off at first by the fact that this is a coupe, but the former owner had kids too and said he had had no problems. Now I see what he means. I can see the advantages for a parent. There is no way that they can open the rear doors in motion, or leaving them ajar, on a two-door vehicle. No safety belts stuck in doors, or doors being left unlocked. Or even on this vehicle leaving the rear window open. The two rear windows do not open at all. No hands stuck out the window at the most inopportune time, no arguments about who should keep whose window open. There goes half the worry and annoyance of driving with the family.
Lessons Learned from the Experience
With this event in prospect I have been paying close attention to the automobile industry in general. It seems that I am not the only one looking for fuel economy. Most buyers are, and economical cars are simply not available, at any price. This Echo, and its successor the Yaris, are "entry level," but as subcompacts they are all but alone in being economical on fuel. Most buyers have been impressed with other things. Interestingly, though, automakers are finally, after so many decades of stonewalling, starting to make electric cars.
I was interested to read in Phil Edmundston's annual car buyer's book, Lemonaid, that in his opinion hybrids are nothing but a publicity stunt. They are unreliable, have twice as many parts and their batteries need replacing every few years. After much reading and pondering about this question, I think he is right. If a Honda ICE engine built back in 1993 (not to mention at least one modified car built in the 1970's) was more economical, hybrids are hardly the result of a technical advance. Their mileage is at best a slight improvement, usually nullified by higher repair bills and quicker depreciation.
The fact is that the straight electric car is a perfect automobile, and has been for well over a hundred years. Nothing can do better by any criterion, speed, economy, adaptability, quietness, lack of maintenance, durability, efficiency, the list goes on.
Even by the dubious macho criterion of "muscle," EV's are better. Check out the Youtube video where a wimpy, boxy 1980 economy car that has been converted to an electric motor competes in a drag race with a four hundred horsepower, V8, supercharged Dodge Charger. Guess, who leaves who in the dust?
You watch that race and wonder, "What could have possessed people to invest so much time, money and resources in the gas guzzling, grossly inefficient internal combustion engine?" Only about twenty percent of the energy they consume goes into propelling the vehicle forward. The rest, I suppose, goes into pumping hydrocarbons and other poisons into the air.
When the now-doomed General Motors in its glory days was forced to make an electric car they and the whole industry were probably shocked to find what comes out in interviews in the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" The fortunate few who leased the vehicle all said the same thing, they loved it. A mechanic is interviewed who did periodic maintenance checks on those GM electric cars. In the film he says that unlike the long routine of checks and adjustments for gas guzzlers, all he did was change the windshield washer fluid and send them on their way. That was it. Imagine, one job in ten in our present economy is in some way connected to the automobile industry. As soon as we switch over to electric that would probably drop right away to one in thirty or forty jobs. Heaven forbid. How much cheaper and easier it is for the companies to keep bribing political interests to allow them to keep their ICEy stranglehold on the industry.
There is one reason, and one only, that this ridiculous situation has been allowed to continue. The military needs gas and diesel engines for its heavy, armored equipment. They subsidize a way of running vehicles that never made any sense for civilian applications.
Needless to say, as soon as the means become available I will convert this Echo to electric. I will make a special request to the mechanic to allow me to stomp on the ICE engine after they have taken it out. Or, better still, Thomas can put to good use that sledgehammer we have sitting in our garage.
Even now the electric cars they are showing in auto expositions are little more than that, a show. Most of them are so expensive or over-designed that they do not merit mention here. The Tata Motors car in India, which can easily be converted to electric by local craftspersons, is a good step forward. The best of a bad lot is the Miev, or Mitsubishi In-wheel Electric Vehicle (YouTube has several demos and test drives of this remarkable machine). The Miev takes a hundred and ten-year-old idea and places the electric motors inside the wheels. This is the only sensible way to build a car, since it leaves the rest of the body, with the exception of batteries, entirely free for the design needs of passengers and freight. If it ever hits the production lines it would be great. But I am afraid that will never happen.
I am not saying that I have no sympathy for the automobile manufacturers. As has been pointed out, unlike the financial industry that is corrupting governments and bringing down the whole world's economy, at least they are producing a product that you can touch and is of benefit to somebody, however inadequate it may be. But the fact is that electrification offers no financial benefit to them. Their main profits come from oversize pickups, SUV's and minivans -- and that means artificially skewing the laws of economics in their favor. If they ever started making sensible machines they well know that they would soon be out of business.
Imagine what kind of product you would get if you had death row prisoners design and build their own guillotine. Would you expect a new guillotine to come out that would, say, double the number of heads that roll? No, you would expect promises, delays, and in the end little more than the same chopping rate that you got in the past. This is no surprise. When your neck is on the line you will do everything necessary to keep your head.
The only way to get sensible designs and overall improvements is to do just what Comenius said: look at a universal problem from a universal perspective. In other words, ask how to improve transit and transportation, do not ask how to help any particular company or industry. To make this more clear, imagine a planner trying to improve human lifespan. She could go into the hospices and frantically try to improve life support machinery for a few specific individuals, or she could look at whatever measure will increase the overall lifetime of large populations. Mathematically, there is no comparison between the cost effectiveness of these two approaches.
So, to conclude, if we want to be sure of electrifying the car industry we, the people of the world, will have to do it ourselves by taking matters into our own hands. It is not as hard as it seems at first blush. As Baha'u'llah said,
"How often have things been simple and easy of accomplishment, and yet most men have been heedless, and busied themselves with that which wasteth their time!" (Epistle, 138)
All we do is publish open standards for every purpose we put vehicles to. There are only two main uses for the personal automobile, first, a local, city car for running about and commuting, and, more rarely, a longer range, intercity auto for vacations. Well over 90 percent of driving is the former, which is electric car territory. The only excuse, flimsy as it is, for gas guzzlers is for the latter, long-range purposes. So to solve that problem you see to it that city cars can be freely exchanged temporarily with a guzzler for vacations and other long trips. To end guzzlers forever, just require that every wheel sold have an electric motor built into it, even if the electricity comes from another, less environmentally friendly engine, be it gas, diesel, or whatever. If the standards are truly universal, free and open, any maker, local or multi-national, could compete to make a better part that will fit any car.
Do that and the Gordian Knot is cut forever.
--
John Taylor
email: badijet@gmail.com
blog: http://badiblog.blogspot.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment