Category Archives: gear-head

we got about 2 feet of snow this weekend. it was pretty great, I stayed in for most of it, was snowed in with the beau and that was pretty darn wonderful. It did mean that almost all of my weekend plans were canceled, but it also meant I got to watch some olympics.

sunday night the beau drove me home and helped me to shovel out my car. by helped, I mean, he shoveled out my car. the knee doctor on friday morning told me that if there was a blizzard I shouldn’t go outside and I took him at his word. I am so glad that the mister could dig me out.

here’s my little car, an exercise in natural windtunneling. The car was nearly covered by drifts and it looks like the wind was blowing from front to back because there was some definite wind-related drift scour that looks like it could mimic air flow over the insight. I sketched on the snow line and the approximate car body line on this camera-phone photo:

flo

Originally uploaded by karinajean.

Oh, Flo. How I love you. We’ve shared so many good times together, and been to so many different places together. You’re falling apart and you sound terrible and you’ve got an unknown and excessive amount of miles on you, but you’re still a good friend with a lot of heart.

I called charity cars today to see if they could pick her up and hopefully find her a new family, some poor person who needs a ride badly. So by this time next week, poor flo will be off on a new adventure without me. It really does make me sad. I thought that I’d be with flo when she stopped running. No one ever thought she’d last as long as she did or take me as many places as she did – when I took her over 3 years ago dad said “take the car – it’s not safe for rachel to drive”. What a trouper, and what a fine automobile. Full of joy and zip and loving fast speeds as much as I do. I feel so sad, and so guilty, for giving up on her before she gives up on me. I’ve never walked away from a running automobile before! I am the life cycle finisher! And Flo, I think, has at least another 25K of fun and adventure to give some lucky person.

I just spoke to a fellow at metro honda who will get me a 2006 honda insight in 2 weeks for $21K.

WHEW. I know, I’ve been talking about this for a long time. But now that I’m getting close to dropping thousands of dollars on a car, well, I am seriously nervous about it! Car payments are scary, NJ insurance premiums are scary, and my little car still works really good. In fine karinajean fashion, I should probably make a list of why I need to get this new car.

1. I already have a mpg sticker for the insight.
2. there are rust holes so large on my car that I can stick my whole hand into the fender
3. similarly, the windshield is broken, and because the frame around the windshield is so rusty it will require a lot of extra caulking.
4. the speedometer doesn’t work. which isn’t a big deal, because
5. the dash lights don’t work.
6. the AC has never worked, as far as I know.
7. During my last flat tire repair (last week!) they cut the rattly heat shield off, and now the car sounds a lot more, well, old and rumbly.
8. When it rains my feet get wet. see also #2.
9. the rims are so dented that if I don’t have a skilled tire technician replace flats I have to reinflate my tires every few days.
10. the bumper is coming off, and the tape just isn’t cutting it anymore.

But it STILL RUNS. gosh. I don’t know. It’s so hard to deal this change in attitude, this getting rid of a car that still works! my stepsister told me that maybe I had a different definition of what “still works” means than other people, but is that such a bad thing?

The reasons why I should go ahead and get this new car are:
1. my car probably won’t pass inspection b/c of body damage, and it’s required at the end of the month.
2. it will be really easy to switch to NJ license/registration/insurance if I buy a new car in NJ.
3. I’ll get the big tax deduction ($2K) for the insight if I buy one this year before it’s replaced with the weird tax credit plan next year, for which the manual insight is apparently not eligible. yikes!
4. I have wanted a hybrid car for years, ever since they first came out. I can’t underestimate the street cred of getting 65 mpg, especially when I’m reconciling a NJ driving life style.
5. If I get this car now, at my leisure, I’ll get what I want. If I don’t, and wait to get a new car for mine to break, I might have to settle.

I guess that’s good enough. ARGH, car loan debt. ARGH, insurance payments with a car loan. Sigh.

there’s a webpage up and the only CVT thing is confirmed:

http://automobiles.honda.com/civics/index.aspx

just got a call from my buddy at keeler honda.

the new civic’s are HOT CARS and they drive great and look great and have a cool dash and great brakes and mine will be coming in the next 4 to 8 weeks BUT….

they’re only in CVT.

CRAP.

it’s decision time: do I want a manual car (Insight, 2 seater but would bet 60+ mpg) or a 4-door civic hybrid that gets 50/50 mpg? heck.

after I received a comment from a fellow honda civic hybrid list-waiter and manual-transmission lover saying she’d heard from another albany honda location that they would ONLY offer CVT (BOO), well, I got nervous!

I called the honda dealership near me in NJ and the guy said he didn’t know, but expected it would be the same as the current civic (both transmissions available). He also said that they have started production (YAY) and expected shipment in September or October (PHEW!).

So I put in a call to my salesguy in Albany (different dealership than Karen’s) and hopefully he’ll have some scoop for me. The last time I called he did say that he didn’t know any more than I do. le sigh.

In other car-type news, the Union of Concerned Scientists, has put out a list of hybrid and alt-fuel incentives by state.

AND totally wait for my next post, all about my NEW DIESEL CAR! and my REDISCOVERED LOVE OF BIODIESEL! and my EMAIL to the GOVERNOR OF NY!

there’s not a lot of hard numbers available still, but honda has started to release information about the new hybrid and newly designed civic.

treehugger has the pertinent information linked. And it’s a great blog, too.

the new design looks like it’s got a bigger electric engine and some fancy engine controls that keeps all cylinders from going at the same time. It looks super efficient, and I think it must be considered a full hybrid now (up until now all hondas were mild hybrids, relying on the battery for assists only. the full hybrid [such as the prius] can run on the electric motor alone.) which is so cool.

I am super excited about the car! it really looks like it will be more efficient and smaller and lighter than current models, which is all important to me. The only thing that remains to be seen is the transmission: will they have a manual, or will they faze it out in favor of the CVT? hopefully honda will stick to it’s street racing creds and cater to those of us who appreciate the manual transmission for power boost and for fun driving. I have a call in to the albany honda guy and I hope he gets back to me soon!

I just put my name on the order list for the 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid. It’s been totally redesigned (both body AND hybrid technology, I hear) and looks very awesome. I don’t know if the hybrid will be a 2 door or a 4 door, but that’s fine. 2 door is HOTTER but hybrid is hybrid.

My stepsis has a friend/excoworker who works at honda in albany and I called him and told him it HAD to be a manual transmission (these NJ highways really beg that extra boost, plus it’s more efficient than CVT/automatic technology, and more fun to drive too…), and it could be any color except red but white was preferred. He’ll call back with the tech specs, including how great the hybrid engine is. I wasn’t super impressed with the efficiency of the last version, so am really hoping they managed to find a happy medium between the efficiency of the old version and the superefficiency of the honda insight.

the official page is here.

I’ve never bought a new car before! I’ve never bought a CAR before, always having been gifted with free hand-me-down automobiles. I guess I’m old enough…

The big boss is borrowing my little car to drive to a site. Hee. there are several funny things about this, including:

1. major rust damage
2. bumper falling off, held on with tyvek tape.
3. bad clutch
4. speedometer doens’t work.

I wonder if he’ll give me a raise after seeing how the other half lives? I don’t need a raise, but I do anticipate some friendly ribbing about the car.

OH HECK. I have little bug and animal trading cards stuck all over the dashboard. Informal poll: should I remove these before handing over the keys?

I was emailing a friend about these cool little bitty methanol* fuel cells, and she said “should I buy stock?”

and I realized that if my social security funds were handed to me for investment i.e. “personal funds” I would totally use that money for speculative investment. Like, very risky investments that I didn’t research very well, but I liked because they promoted groundbreaking technologies that I personally forecast as the Next Big Thing, or maybe The Big Thing That Will Save America From Herself.

and while that might be fun, and exciting, and interesting,
it’s not the right way to save for retirement.

* I consider methanol fuel cells to be, by the way, so much better than hydrogen fuel cells. For one, I don’t really consider hydrogen a RENEWABLE fuel. All hydrogen is currently obtained by cracking natural gas, which is a fossil fuel, albeit one with lower tailpipe emissions than gasoline or coal. But it’s going to at least get awfully expensive, at worst run out pretty darn quick if we keep using it for heating, and for chemical production, and for electricity generation, and ALSO to power a hydrogen economy? Methanol, on the other hand, while produced primarily from natural gas now, is a byproduct of lots of industrial processes and also can be refined from methane, aka, landfill gas and cow farts. It’s a fuel with a sense of humor!

b/c of all the driving I’ve been doing I have been thinking a lot about my car. Like, will it make it? it’s got 187K (more or less, probably more, the speedometer doesn’t work that often but when it does it says I’m going faster than I really am, so…) on it. It’s got the original clutch, and believe you me it is getting more and more obvious lately. It has the original timing belt, and that’s something that ought to be replaced around 90K before it breaks in a spectacularly destructive fashion.

my stepsister works at a auto dealership and she said maybe she could get me a discount on a used car. So I started thinking about what kind of a car I would get to replace “Florence the Low-Brow Villain” (tm the Car Talk Name Generator that I can’t find right now) should she give up the ghost. Never mind that it is absolutely a foreign concept for me to actually buy a car while my old one still works — you have to understand that I am the auto graveyard in my family. I get the cars at the end of their useful life, and I drive them until they break. I complete the life cycle! I conserve by reusing!

so, I came up with a list of things that are very important to me when considering a car, and here they are in ranked order:
1. super efficient gas mileage (flo gets about 40 highway, and towards 30 city driving)
2. a little bitty car, sub-compact preferably but a compact is ok
3. a stick shift and
4. a backseat.
Oh, and it ABSOLUTELY CAN NOT be red. I drive too fast as it is to attract any more authoritative attention.

With a list like that, I’m not really sure what kind of a car I could get! Most hybrids are going to CVT technology and don’t have manual transmissions any more. Other used cars may have gas mileage as high as 30 mpg, so a used slightly efficient car might be an option. At least with that option a manual transmission would probably be cheaper. But the cars probably won’t be tiny. Here’s a life cycle/benefit-cost analysis question: is it better to purchase an expensive new hybrid, or to continue as the end of life person, reusing old cars until they’re gone? I can’t tell right now. The answer probably includes things like projected costs of gasoline, discount rates, anticipated required car repairs, insurance premiums, and time costs should vehicles break. If I want to include externalities like emissions factors, well, that might really get messy.

I’m going to hold on to my car until it breaks because 1. she works really good, and 2. I don’t need a car payment while I’ve got grad. school style credit card balances to pay off. But if I were to get a car right now I might be seriously considering a used honda insight. There are 2000 models online for about $9K, but they have ~80K miles on them. However: they get great gas mileage (about 61 mpg average) and it would be a used car, so I wouldn’t be freaked out about owning something new and expensive. The no back seat thing is kind of a drag, but I am thinking of it like this: now that I’m commuting to and from work in a CAR, I’m driving a LOT by my self. Say, 7 hours a week. Even if I went on longer trips it would probably be by myself too, or with just one other person. The only time I need more seats than 2 in my car are when I’m in albany and my bro, nephew and I go somewhere (he’s got a 2 seater too) or when I’m camping and we all pile into cars to go somewhere for dinner. I’m not the only one of my friends with a car anymore, there are lots of other people with vehicles to drive if we need to car pool. So if I need a car with a back seat I might as well RENT ONE. what a freeing, groundbreaking and revolutionary concept! I am so into it.