Blessed by the Potato

I very nearly bought a Honda Civic Hybrid to replace my Accord when it was stolen in 2006. The HCH was every bit as driveable as a regular Civic, got great gas mileage (on par with the 2nd gen Prius), and was cheap enough that it made financial sense even with sub-$1 gas prices (though that was due in large part to the federal and provincial rebates available at the time, and the small-ish markup over the Civic LX model). However, it was stricken from our list of possibilities due to the compromises in storage space: the battery in the trunk ate up about a third of the trunk space, so that sunk the deal right there.

The Prius, being a versatile hatchback and custom-designed around its hybrid system, outsold the pants off the HCH. There was speculation as to why this was, often with people saying that because the Prius was a unique, hybrid-only model, buyers were choosing it for the “statement” it made — it was recognizable as a hybrid. Myself, and others interested in the Prius thought that was hogwash. Indeed, not only do I not care about the “statement” my car makes about me, I’d prefer if it blended in and looked more like say a Matrix. It was simply a practical car that required very few sacrifices for the hybrid technology, unlike the other models. This was largely with respect to trunk space, helped by the hatchback design.

So Honda came out with the Insight-II, a car that at first glance looked like a mini-Prius. Unfortunately, there were some bizarre design decisions: the hybrid system looked to be more primitive than the one Honda had been running on the HCH for a few years: if you came to a stop and the engine turned off, so did the air conditioning. The fuel economy was worse than in the larger HCH. The interior “felt cheap”. The price tag, while lower than a HCH or Prius, was still too high for such a small car, with such a small improvement in rated fuel consumption over its smaller competition (e.g., the Fit). Plus, right around the time it was introduced, the federal government canned the EcoAuto rebates.

Oddly enough, Honda looks to have continued this trend of making their hybrids worse and cheaper with the new 2-seater CR-Z. They also went back to a manual transmission, and while there are some die-hard 2-seater gearheads that simply must have a manual, any failures in the early Insights and HCHs (gen I) were much more likely to occur in manual transmission cars. That decision may bite them in the butt further down the road. It scored so low in their testing that Consumer Reports can’t recommend it. (Though to nit-pick on CR’s post, many cars have absurdly low rated weight capacities, due to how those are calculated and the margins of safety that go into them).

I don’t understand why Honda is not getting this right — why each successive iteration of their hybrid system seems to be worse than what they had in 2006 with the HCH.

I was just out getting the car ready for winter here, since it was a nice sunny day to do it. When getting the car ready for winter there are things for safety and things for fuel economy. Plus if there’s any regular maintenance you tend to do yourself, you may want to get that done and out of the way while you can still feel your fingers.

Tires: The biggest improvement you can make for winter safety is a set of 4 winter-rated tires, and I actually changed over back in October. I was a little early, as the time to change is when you can expect the temperature when you drive to be consistently below 15°C. Since I do most of my driving at night I felt comfortable changing over earlier, and got a good deal on the tires in the process (for the new car, I got a set of Gislaved Nordfrost 5s from Steelcase Tires in Markham). They engage in “supply and demand pricing” as they put it — they say that by November the cars are lined up around the block for winter tires and they won’t be offering deals anymore. If you need tires this winter, there may still be a few places with deals around (mostly the manufacturer’s mail-in-rebates), but I found last year that the deals didn’t come back when business slowed down towards the middle of winter, so you may be stuck paying retail.

It’s also important to check your pressures regularly, both for safety and good fuel economy. I like to run my tires a little hard, as it gives better fuel consumption and wear, at the cost of a rougher ride. The number on the door jamb is a compromise number set by the car manufacturer to balance ride, fuel consumption, tire life, and the suspension parts, and should be considered your minimum pressure. Your maximum pressure is given on the sidewall of the tires, and in-between those you can find a tire pressure that meets your preferred compromise. For the fall though, I recommend going a little higher than you normally would, because pressure falls as the temperature drops. It’s easier to over-inflate (still staying below the sidewall max) on a nice warm day than to have to go out on the cold days and top-up. The rule of thumb is that the pressure drops about 1 PSI for every 5°C drop in temperature. So if it goes from +5 to -20 over the next month, you could lose 5 PSI. Not really enough to be a danger on its own, but worth watching and reinflating.

The actual math is a proportionality P₁*T₂ = P₂*T₁ — note that you have to use the absolute (Kelvin) scale of temperature. So you see that for a higher-pressure tire, the drop in pressure will be larger than for a lower-pressure one. If, for example, I was to consider 40 PSI as normal for my tires (since I do like to run a little hard), then going from 277 K (5°C) to 252 K (-20°C) would be a drop of 4 PSI, pretty close to the quick rule-of-thumb result.

Windshield: It’s vitally important that you can see, which means you’ve got to have your snowbrush/ice scraper ready to go… which means you’ve got to have it in your car before you’re miles from home in the first snowstorm of the year and belatedly remember that you need it. Likewise you’re also going to need to clean your windshield as you drive, which is where wipers and fluid come in handy. Wiper blades generally need to be replaced at least once a year, and I find the fall a good time to do that (though I forgot this year so far). You’re also going to need washer fluid that won’t freeze on your windshield (or worse yet, in the lines), so if you’ve been using the pink bug stuff through the summer, time to start mixing in the antifreeze stuff.

This is also a good time to clean the windows, especially if you’re in the habit of using any kind of cleaning solution, which may freeze later on (these days I just clean my windows with a dry microfibre cloth).

Grill blocking: It’s a less common winter prep step, one geared just for fuel economy rather than safety. The concept is that your car has been designed for a very wide variety of environments: from the dead of winter, to rolling through death valley in full sunshine with the A/C blasting. So those openings at the front of the car are letting way too much airflow through when it’s freezing cold outside, making the radiator shed more heat than it needs to when it’s freezing cold outside, causing you to burn more fuel just to keep your engine’s temperature up. If you block off some of that airflow by insulating your engine compartment, you can improve warm-up time, save on fuel, and as an added bonus, help keep some of the salty slushy muck that gets kicked up off the road out of your engine bay.

For most cars, once the temperature is consistently below zero, you should be fine blocking well over half of the radiator, even under heavy loads (e.g., long hill climbs). Above zero, and you could risk overheating in some cases. If your car has a temperature gauge, watch it when temperatures start to rise; if it doesn’t, you may want to play it safe by not blocking except in the dead of winter, or get a Scanguage to monitor your temperatures.

The Prius (and I’m sure other hybrids) has a bit of a twist, as it has two radiators: one for the engine coolant, and one for the inverter. You do not want to block the radiator for the inverter: that’s a “cooler is better” component. For the Gen 3 (2010 and later), that means blocking the lower openings (the ones below the front license plate), but not the upper ones. I believe the Gen 2 is the opposite, but check that yourself to be sure.

As an aside, this step is even more important for a hybrid than a regular car, as a regular doesn’t have too much trouble staying up at temperature, even in the winter. A hybrid though will be shutting the engine off completely when it can, but for emissions control reasons it will have to keep the engine at operating temperature, a goal made all the harder by the cabin heater drawing off heat. So the benefit of shutting the engine off will be reduced in the winter as the car will cycle it on more just to keep temperatures up if you don’t block the radiator.

Battery: Due to the effect of the cold on your battery’s charge and the difficulty in turning over your engine, if your battery is going to go, the time it will give up the ghost will be in the middle of winter. If your battery is weak and due for replacement, you may want to replace it now. If you roll with one of those handy boosters (e.g., the Eliminator) in your trunk, then remember to charge it up!

Miscellaneous: I know that when it’s cold outside, I don’t want to spend any more time going over my car than I have to. I tend to get a little more neglectful of checking my fluids and tire pressures than I am in the warmer seasons, so this is a good time to check that all those other fluids are topped up. Also check on your first aid kit and flashlight, and replace stuff as needed. If you get into an accident, winter’s the time you’re going to need that little silvery mylar blanket, so make sure you’ve got one. If you don’t, ask anyone you know who runs marathons, they give them out like candy at those races. I like to wax my car in the spring, since the winter time seems to eat it all off. Waxing in the fall is also good because that water-repelling layer also helps repel snow and ice — I have a much easier time brushing the snow off the roof and hood at the beginning of winter while there’s sill some wax left there than I do by the end (and yes, you must brush the snow off the roof too!).

Have I missed any winter prep steps that you like to do?

I’m disgusted by this article in the Huffington Post. I’ve been warned about that rag and the quality of their science knowledge (worse than none) before, but it became the topic of some discussion over at PriusChat, and I had to check it out for myself. Note that I have ranted on this subject before.

The author describes her experience buying a Prius, after which she experienced headaches. She took the car back to the dealer, got a Highlander instead, and the headaches went away.

If that was all there was to it, it’d be fine: a weird anomaly, who knows why it happened, but her problem is solved so good for her.

But that wasn’t all there was to it. Because the Prius is a hybrid, she immediately jumped to the conclusion that somehow, the magnetic fields were causing her headaches. She then goes on to insinuate that these same fields caused “inflammatory” issues and a brain tumour in people she knows who happen to drive hybrids.

This is not evidence, it’s not science, it’s fearmongering of the worst sort.

To try to add weight to her arguments, she got a “meter” and tried taking some measurements of the magnetic fields on her own. And you know what, the only thing the general public fears more than magnetic fields are numbers, so you can bet that went well. She obviously did not know how the meter (or magnetic fields) work, because she only gives one number in the article.

Here’s the thing about magnetic fields: they’re kind of like sound. You have a frequency, and a strength. So to say you have a sound of 70 dB, or a magnetic field of 2 mG, doesn’t fully describe it. You’d also want to know if it was a deep bass thrum, or a middle C, or so many Hz for the magnetic field. And she doesn’t say that anywhere.

That gets particularly important when she pulls out this mystery meter. I’ll bet you dollars-to-doughnuts she’s trying to use a cheap “trifield” type survey meter, that only has a little dial readout for showing field strength. These are meant to be used around power line fields where you know the frequency you’re dealing with in advance, and they give very screwy results when presented with fields of unknown frequency and transients. Unfortunately, all we can say about the fields present in a car is that they are highly unlikely to be 60 Hz powerline fields.

Often, these meters are induced-current based, so if you have a 1 mG 60 Hz field, it shows up as 1 on the meter. But, if you have a 1 mG 600 Hz field, it shows up as 10 on the meter. So when someone who is unskilled at science or numbers — or much of anything really — gives a number in an article, I have basically zero faith that that number represents what they think it represents. For example, she says that just turning on the Nav and AC system in her car increased the field almost as much as the hybrid drivetrain did, but that makes little to no sense, on many levels. First off, the nav and AC shouldn’t draw nearly as much power as what’s needed to move the car (though all of these are well-shielded in a hybrid), so the measurement shouldn’t have gone as it did. And even if that was the case, it would mean that the nav and AC should be just as much a cause of her headaches as the hybrid drivetrain if she believes magnetic fields are responsible. She shouldn’t be out on a crusade against hybrids, but against in-dash nav systems!

She justifies getting a nav system in her Highlander by saying that the slightly smaller Prius “compacts” the fields, again showing that she doesn’t understand how things work — the extra space in the SUV is wasted, the design constraint still puts the nav system at arm’s reach for the driver.

She then goes on to insinuate that hybrids pose a health danger, remarking that “I started to wonder about my clients who drive hybrids. Every one of them has an inflammatory issue that baffles me…” Her byline says that she’s “Yoga, health expert”. What do you want to bet that every one of her clients, no matter what they drive, has “an inflammatory issue”?

The conclusion though was the biggest tip-off for anyone remotely familiar with the FUD surrounding hybrids that she was not a source to be taken seriously: she repeats some of the nonsense about the batteries and Sudbury, that has been debunked many times (including here), clearly indicating that she has not done her homework.

Scientific articles have peer review systems to try to catch these kinds of glaring errors, and those occasionally do fail (recently, our group tore apart an article, providing 3 pages of corrections, and the other reviewer said simply “it’s fine”). But the mainstream media, which should be more careful since it deals with a more credulous audience, often has much more glaring mistakes present — perhaps because journalists are equally credulous when it comes to technical matters.

All that said, we return to the issue of her headaches. It’s been said that we can’t disagree with the fact that she experienced headaches that went away when she changed cars. I’d say that we could disagree with even that level of evidence (did she make it up to get a controversial article out that other people would cite, even if just to debunk her?), especially given how subjective and random headaches can be. But, let’s grant that her headaches did happen, and even that they went away with the change in cars. It could be that the headaches were unrelated to the car itself, and could have been due to the stress of buying a new car, worrying about finances, etc., and would have gone away in a few days/weeks anyway. But even if we grant that somehow, the headaches were due specifically to the car, that does not lead us to blame the hybrid transmission and/or magnetic fields. There simply is no evidence of that. She had an individual problem, and she solved it by changing cars, and that’s great for her. But it’s misleading to then go and blame one specific aspect of the car without any evidence. She could have been allergic to the ecoplastic used in the dash, or to a host of other things. My favourite theory revolves around the rearview mirror: the Prius is a great car and I love it, but the rearview mirror is horribly low. I’m constantly ducking my head to look under it to check for pedestrians as I make a right turn, and if she was doing the same that repetitive head-ducking motion could have given her a headache. Or, similarly, the rear spoiler splits the rear window, at just about the height most cars’ headlights fall. If she’s driving down even a moderately bumpy road, their lights would constantly strobe to her point of view as they disappear behind the spoiler and reappear above or below it.

There are numerous reasons why this car in particular could be giving her headaches, and unless she’s willing to get back in it for some experimentation, we can’t say what factor could be responsible (if any). It brings us back to the issue of placebos: for an individual person, a placebo may work to solve their problem, such as a headache. They may be willing to pay money for a placebo (e.g., a homeopathic tincture). On the individual level, that’s fine: do what you need to do to solve your individual problem. But on a societal level, we don’t want to ascribe efficacy to what we know are really just placebos and have them for sale in our pharmacies, because it’s not good science, and it’s not good policy. Likewise, we don’t want to go around banning things like cell phones and wifi and hybrids without evidence that they are indeed causing harm (and if she’s afraid of hybrids, man, wait till she sees some of the controversy over cell phones!).

Finally, a quick repeat of my note on risk vs benefits. We know that hybrid cars have demonstrable environmental and financial benefits. We know that they can reduce our individual exposure to known carcinogens (e.g.: diesel), and our societal exposure to other pollutants. We don’t have good evidence that they even do have increased magnetic fields inside of the passenger compartment, and if they did, whether those fields would be harmful. The risk-benefit right now is highly likely skewed towards there being a worthwhile benefit, but because people are so afraid of the unknown, the unknown risks are large in their minds, and lead to articles like this one.

I was out helping a friend car shop today when I ran into a fairly sleazy dealer tactic. The guy was actually a pretty good salesman: enthusiastic, knew the car, personable… but then he started hammering out numbers (using the “adjust to a certain monthly budget” method) too fast to follow. He was trying to beat a quote she got from Mazda, which has 0% financing right now, and he said that Kia didn’t (though when we checked the website afterwards, they did). He was going to discount the car to make up for the financing, and was hammering away on the calculator. He turned the calculator around, and said he could do $162. We were like wow, that’s less than half of Mazda’s quote. “Oh, no, that’s bi-weekly, so multiply by 2 to get $324 per month. Pretty good, right?”

Pretty sleazy, actually. There are 26 bi-weekly periods in a year, but only 24 twice-a-month periods. So to get a monthly payment from a bi-weekly one, you have to multiply by 26 and divide by 12, which is 2.167, not just 2X. So he was actually presenting a $351/mo payment, which was more than the Mazda.

I got the windows on the Prius tinted last weekend at Auto-Links. I ended up choosing them because they had a lot of good reviews over at redflagdeals, including a group buy discount from that group (which is still good if you’re considering tinting your car), and their prices were roughly $100-150 less than what the dealership wanted for tinting. John and Cody seem to run a quality shop, taking care to wash the windows really well before applying the computer-cut tint. In fact, there was a minor problem with one of the tint sheets and John threw it right out, no hesitation on doing the job right.

I have to admit that my heart leaped into my chest when I heard the “pop-pop-pop-pop” of the retaining clips releasing the door panel (they need to open the door panel to get the film to the bottom of the glass), but of course they’re pros, and it all went back together nicely (no door rattles either, which was my big worry since it’s a problem I’ve managed to avoid thus-far on the Prius).

I ended up up-selling myself into the ceramic tint: I really don’t care about the electronic non-interference perk, but I did want to stay with a fairly light tint since I do so much night driving, while getting better heat rejection. One of the big reasons for getting the windows tinted in the first place was to reduce heat build-up, and the ceramic was not that much more for a fairly large increase in heat rejection. The film came in a “30%” and “40%” optical transmission, though apparently the ceramic is actually lighter than the rating. It is indeed a fairly subtle tint, this isn’t a black-out gangsta limo tint:

I got 30% on the back, and 40% on the front, and there is zero issue with night-time driving, with the possible exception of some light from headlights behind me appearing to streak out along the defogger lines of the rear window (I hope to update later with a picture of that effect). I’m hoping that will settle down as the film cures and adheres better to the window, but either way it’s not a big issue. In fact, I probably could have gone darker on the back (I had in my head going in that I wanted something in the ~20-25% range), but unfortunately the one downside to Auto-Links & ceramic tint is that there aren’t a lot of choices along the tint spectrum, with nothing available between 15% and 30%. One final perk I should mention is that these guys take Monday and Tuesdays off so they can work the weekend, which was great because Sundays are a good day to have this sort of thing done!