Having happily ignored my car for the better part of the last two months, this morning's $45 tank of gas was a bit of a shock. And though I was already thinking about selling my car, it's not so much the price of gas that I feel pushing me over the edge, as it is the laserlike focus from both sides of the aisle on "gas relief." I'm pretty happy with my train and my bus, and I think other people would be too.
Archive for the 'Cars' Category
Whether it's because people in the bay area think they're even more clever than their neighbors or because there's just more disposable income floating around, the fact of the matter is there are a lot of vanity plates to be seen in these parts. (Or maybe it's just the fact that I spend 17 days a year in my car commuting.) I believe I've finally seen enough plates to declare the worst vanity plate I've ever seen:
I was driving north on 19th and had just passed Noriega when it happened: A giant black Range Rover cut in front of me without signalling. But before I even had a chance to get very upset about the fact that my view of (anything) had been obstructed, I saw its license plate: ERRANDS. "Are you kidding me?" The thing is, now that I think about it, I think they actually meant it. I don't believe anyone who could afford that gas guzzling waste of space (much less anyone who actually lives in the bay area and yet still bought that thing) could have saved up enough irony over the course of their entire life to select that plate ironically.
That said, today I encountered a runner up: A BMW 3-series whose plate read MMMONEY.
Sometimes the little things can totally make my day, and while driving home from Fathers Day this weekend, I had just such a moment.
I keep my CDs in a 2x2 CD binder which normally lives in my passenger seat. Without really thinking about it, I had always just oriented it "right side up," which required me to reach just slightly too far to comfortably access the top row of CDs.
So, I turned my CD binder upside down, so now all the CD slots are facing towards me instead of towards the passenger door, making my interaction with each row effectively two rows closer. Not only is this a lot easier, but it's probably safer, too.
Jim Motavalli's New York Times review of the Honda FCX was quite an encouraging read:
Given my experience with fuel-cell prototypes that were noisy, balky and incapable of going very far between refuelings, the FCX was something of a surprise. Featuring the latest generation of Honda's own fuel cells (hundreds of them are arrayed in two multiple sets, called stacks) and a body and electric motor derived from the company's unsuccessful EV Plus battery vehicle, the FCX felt like a real car, not a high-strung test mule.
The FCX carried a federal combined city-highway economy rating of 57 miles per kilogram, but since the car holds less than four kilos of hydrogen - a very light gas - long cruises are a challenge. [...]
The pricing of hydrogen remains fluid. The Department of Energy has estimated that the cost of a kilogram of hydrogen (with roughly the energy content of a gallon of gasoline) could fall to $3 by 2008, but that assumes certain economies of scale that have not yet been established.
In particular, I'm interested in what's involved in preparing hydrogen for usage in a fuel cell. That process needs to be clean and efficient, too.
While searching for this review on news.google.com so I could read the NYT article without logging in, I came across Mike Millikin's discussion of the same NYT article:
A successful plug-in hybrid strategy will have some major PR work to do to counter the apparently automatic (and from what I can tell, unwarranted) bias against a plug-in architecture.
I don't think a bias against plugging in is unwarranted. I suspect people's objections are based on the lack a plug-in terminal infrasctructure . Anything they can't take away from home very long probably isn't going to be received well, and in my case, I wouldn't even be able to use it at home in the first place: I only have street parking for my car; Where would I ever be able to plug it in?
More importantly, as long as there's resistance to plug-ins, there will probably never be enough demand for the infrastructure to overcome the logistical issues with making it available.
See also: laptops.
A handy article about, but what I find most interesting about this is the use of a blogspot blog to publish a single article. (via Ernie)
"The canyon segment of Route 178 scores a unheard of 257 on the state's safety index; this means that the canyon portion of Route 178 gets 257% more accidents then would be expected on a mythical state highway with similar average daily traffic." Huh, it never occurred to me that there are freeway geeks, but here we have it.
It's really sad that most of my initial observations about San Francisco are about driving. But given that I had to drive to get here, I guess that's kind of understandable. Let's get them out of the way quick:
- San Francisco needs some pretty serious traffic sign infrastructure to get people where they need to go. And yet, there are still several classes of information that I'm having a really hard time finding when I need it:
- All way stops lack the "All Way" placard at the bottom of the stop sign, making me nervous about pretty much every stop sign I stop at. I'm gradually learning to look at the street for that information, though.
- Street names can be awfully hard to find, because they seem to vary in size, color, placement, and redundancy.
- As if the idea of parallel parking on 19th street weren't daunting enough, let's throw in the added complication of needing to pop the right side of your car up onto the sidewalk unless you want your car to get smeared.
- Parking in my neighborhood turns out to not be as impossible as I feared, but it can be still frustratingly difficult at times. Easily the most irritating thing is the spots between two driveways that are ever-so-slightly too small for my slightly longer than average car that I park in only to find I'm sticking over on both sides. Those're the worst, and only make me want a Mini that much more.
It turns out I suck at parallel parking behind abnormally sized cars -- like a MINI -- which led to this quote:
"Stop talking! You're giving me parking performance anxiety!"
-- bsii
"You should get some parking viagra for that."
-- tyler
Brand names for parking aphrodisiacs are left as an exercise for the reader.
I've spent a lot of time driving in the last few days, during which I spent more than a little time thinking about driving, etc. Here are some of those thoughts, admittedly without much embellishment. It just doesn't seem necessary.
- Headlight Pet Peeves:
- The "feature" of some cars where they fall-back to using the bright bulb when the regular headlight burns out. This is especially bad because it doesn't clue the idiot driver in to the fact that his headlight is burnt out. Hopefully the car shines a MicroLight into his eyes until he gets his headlights fixed.
- Idiots who drive with their fog lights on all the time are really starting to piss me off. Especially when said idiot is a great big truck behind me, because then I don't stand a chance of ever seeing again.
- And to the bastard who somehow had six headlights who was behind me on 80 to Tahoe last weekend: die.
In other news: While my car has dual sliding moonroofs, I don't really like having the slider open, much less have I ever even actually opened them -- they just happened to be a feature that was on the car that I bought. That said, the one time I do really like to have windows in my roof is when it's raining. (Though clearly I don't open them in that case). Also, it's nice for the paranoid so they can check to make sure their snowboards are still on the roof from time to time.
Finally: I really wish my car had some rear view mirror wipers. That'd be useful. Maybe as a stopgap I just need to find a rear view mirror sized squeegee.
I got my license plates today, and I'm fairly disappointed. The plate's letter block is fairly boring... But I guess I can feel some limited satisfaction in getting to sneak around the state's restriction that "The number '69' is reserved for 1969 year model vehicles" for vanity plates, and as long as we're looking at it that way, I guess the "4" on my plate is about the best possible number that I could have before the "69."
I got my citation today, and in case you were wondering, it turns out Berkeley's Left Turn Tax is $142.
While I was waiting for my car to be serviced at Sangera Subaru on Friday, I walked down to Toyota to see if they had a new Prius, and there one was. I eagerly approached the first salesman I could see (Before he even had a chance to approach me! Ha, that'll show 'em!) and asked to test drive it. And it's a really nice car.
The seats are really comfortable, and are made of a kind of weird faux-suede. There's a lot of room in the cabin, with a lot of nooks and crannies to put things. The split hatchback window was a little weird when I first looked in the rear view mirror, but once I was driving I didn't even notice it.
Some of the conventions about where things are in a car are so changed in the Prius that I was disoriented even after all the countless pictures I'd looked at. The digital speedometer was way up by where the huge windshield meets the dash, and yet it's large numbers were very easy to read. The other digital displays near the speedometer were just as easy to read. The shifter is very strange, and is basically just a little lever that you push to select either R, D, N, or "B" (not sure what that was), and after you select one the lever pops back to center. The steering wheel of the car was covered with controls that I didn't really play with very much, other than adjusting the cabin temperature and feeling the immediate change in the AC levels.
When I pulled onto the freeway, I found myself going 70 without feeling any real rev of the engine. It just did its CVT thing and suddenly I was going 70, no trouble. It turned very nicely too, and the drive was very smooth on that normally very bumpy section of 99.
Once I was driving, the navigation system turned on, and it started telling me how to get back to the Toyota dealer. I was not at all expecting the thing to speak the directions to me, but speak it did. I'm not sure I would use the voice navigation feature, but watching the map with the little icon representing my car moving around was really really neat. It felt more like a real life video game than anything else I've ever experienced.
And of course the center console computer had a lot of options that I barely scratched the surface of, but the neatest one I found was that you can enter in logs of when you have all of your servicing done (tires rotated, oil changed, etc), and then the car will apparently tell you when some maintenance is scheduled to be done.
Basically, if I were only using my car for commuting, or driving home to visit Bakersfield, I would have been crazy not to get this car. But every time I pay my car bill (the Prius I would have gotten would have been $5000 more than my Subaru), and every time I go snowboarding, I'll remind myself I made the right choice for now. If I'm just patient, I'm sure we'll see Prius-like technologies showing up in many other cars in the not-too-distant future, so hopefully I'll get to enjoy such luxuries (because that's really what they are) in my next car. Which I really shouldn't be thinking about yet, because jesus, I only got my car a month ago.
Hm, I think I need to remember to make a conscious effort to bypass the whole 18-month computer cycle that's pretty much hard-wired into my head when I'm thinking about cars.
Le sigh.