Blessed by the Potato

I want to start by expressing just how very, very difficult it is to try to take a picture of a fine scratch on a clean, shiny, dark car. The camera keeps trying to focus on the reflected image, and even when you can get it to focus on the car, the scratch doesn’t appear nearly as noticeable as it is in real life.

In the first two months of ownership, I’ve managed to do quite a nasty bit of work on the paint of my Prius. It only took a few weeks to get some totally not my fault scratches and dings:

But then I parked under a tree that hates me, and it rained down bird shit and sap all over the hood of my car. I had heard that if you leave bird crap on too long, it can damage the paint, so I wanted to get it off right away. I grabbed a paper towel and some windshield washer fluid, and gave it a few quick wipes. That, unfortunately, was all it took to put some fine spiderweb/swirl scratches into the clear coat. What was far worse, however, was when I tried to get the tree sap off. It wouldn’t come off with washer fluid. It wouldn’t come off with hand soap. It wouldn’t even come off with dish soap, so I tried scrubbing a little bit with dish soap and paper towel, and all I managed to do was put some not-quite-so fine scratches in around the tree sap.

Ooops. These marks were quite noticeable, though that may just be because I did it and feel stupid about it, and nearly every time I walked by the car in the driveway they caught my eye. So I decided to try some Nu Finish Scratch Doctor to see if I could fix my mistake (this time, with detailing microfibre cloths — no more paper towel on the car!).

Some of these scratch removers work by having very fine grit polishers that you use to buff out the top layer of clear coat until it’s smooth and shiny again. I expected the Nu Finish to be the same, but it’s not. I don’t know how it works exactly, but my best guess is that it must somehow fill in the scratches in the clear coat because there’s no polishing needed: just wipe on, wait, and wipe off. The end result is that the scratches are still there, but they are less noticeable. Perhaps the sharp edge in the clearcoat that was catching the light has been rounded out to make it somewhat better, but the scratches are by no means gone:

After that I put on a coat of Nu Finish. There’s a lot of hate out there from serious detailers for Nu Finish, but I’ve used it for many years with decent results. Yes, a multi-stage cleaner, clay-bar, protector, shiner, sealant, and surface wax will give better results, but the one-step Nu Finish still takes over an hour of my time and I’m pretty tired of polishing at the end of that. No way I’m going to invest in the full detailing kit, which in many cases doesn’t last as long, either!

Even though everything is still in the break-in phase and I haven’t gotten around to changing my driving techniques, I’ve been getting pretty decent mileage in the Prius. Around town I’ve averaged 6 L/100 km for the most part, which doesn’t sound very impressive at first blush since the car is rated for 4, but you have to bear in mind that these have been short trips, just to the grocery store or the curling club. I know that in the Accord I was getting 10-12 L/100 km on the same sort of trips. As the weather has been warming up this has been getting better: the car won’t shut the gas engine off until after it’s fully warmed up (for emissions control reasons). In February, I’d get about halfway to the grocery store before I got to that point, now it happens in about 3 blocks. The consumption in town after that first few minutes of warming up has been fantastic: I drove out to Baskin Robbins yesterday for their cheap ice cream day (plus a Canadian Tire trip), and averaged 3.7 L/100 km for the trip (and my first block on the mileage display was again around 6, so the other three blocks were really efficient to make up for it!). The car simply loves London driving: cruising around 65 km/h and only stopping every 2 km or so for a light (and again to compare, I’d estimate that the Accord would get about 8 L/100 km in this kind of driving).

On the highway, I got 3.8 L/100 km driving up to the cottage one weekend, but otherwise have been around 4.5 L/100 km (driving about 110 km/h on the 401) which is quite respectable, and compares to about 7-7.5 L/100 km in the Accord.

Overall, my average has been 5.2 L/100 km in nearly 2000 km of driving. That’s as measured by the amount of gas I’ve put in and the number of km on the odometer. Oddly enough, the car’s computer/display is slightly more optimistic (and this phenomenon is well known on PriusChat).

Unfortunately, the paint is thin. I told you about the first scratch already. Since then there’s been a small rock chip taken out of the front quarterpanel, and then a tree dripped sap on the hood. Sadly, I made that situation worse with my own stupidity by trying to clean it with paper towel, which is apparently too abrasive for the hood, so now there are swirly/spiderweb marks in the clearcoat — and it never touched the sap! Finally some Goo Gone took the sap right off, but the sap looks to have taken some of the clear coat with it (the finish looks kind of dull on that line).

I’m going to try putting on a coat of Nu Finish on the weekend to see if that improves matters at all.

Prius cool fact for this post: the throttle behaviour on the Prius can be changed in different ways. Many cars on the road have a gas pedal that gives you ~80% of your available power within the first 25-50% of your pedal range. That is, you just lightly touch the pedal and you take off to a screaming start. This is often done to give cars a sporty feel, and in part to get around the reluctance many drivers have to put the pedal to the floor when they do actually want full acceleration, but can sometimes lead to jerky acceleration if you don’t have a deft foot (which, sadly, my mother doesn’t). The Prius’ default is to have a linear pedal: 50% depression gives you 50% of your available power. Combined with the fact that there are no gears, this can make it feel sluggish on a test drive since it doesn’t take off with light pedal pressure like you’d expect it do. However, if you put the pedal down like you mean it, the car will go. If you want, you can put the car in “power mode”, which changes the pedal behaviour to give more power in the first part of the depression, to act more like a normal car. Alternately, in “eco mode” things are reversed so that the non-linearity gives you less than 50% of your power in the first half of pedal travel. That gives you more fine control over the lower end of your throttle so you can drive more efficiently with a deft touch.

These driving modes do affect other systems (for example, eco mode will let the air conditioning run lower when the engine is off to try to save energy).

My car has it’s first scratch :(

I have no idea how it happened, but just behind the rear passenger door is a small, curved scratch, about the length of my finger, and just deep enough to show the primer underneath. Now, my old car was covered in small scratches like that (well, maybe not enough to show the primer, but a common complaint about the Prius is how thin the paint is), maybe 3 dozen in total, which indicates that on average, one accumulates these small scratches at a rate of about one every four months, so to get one after a month isn’t too unusual, but I was hoping to go a little longer before having to deal with this…

I’m sure you’ve all heard it before me (since people have been telling me about it while I haven’t been watching/reading the news myself lately): a Prius in California went out of control, and the police had to issue instructions over the loudspeaker to the driver, who then managed to safely stop the car.

I (and many other Prius owners) are anxiously awaiting the full report to try to find out what really went on. I don’t want to prematurely pass judgement one way or the other (on the car or on the driver) while the facts are so thin (and a media in full-hyperbolic frenzy is not usually reliable when it comes to small details).

The biggest questions in my mind immediately were:

1. Why did he not turn the car off?

2. Why did he not put the car in neutral?

Indeed, these are two of the steps that have been widely publicized as ways to stop an out-of-control car as the Toyota recall mess has progressed. An accelerator could become stuck in any car, not just a Toyota, and drivers should know how to manage that situation! It’s possible that he had a rare problem crop up, but poor crisis management lead to it becoming national news.

Now, if he did try these basic steps, and the car didn’t obey those inputs, then we have a more serious problem on our hands. That would represent two levels of failure, and be an extreme safety concern.

Since, at the direction of the officer, he was able to shut the car down and stop, I have to initially suspect that he did not try to turn the car off or shift to neutral (or use the emergency brake?!) until after he spent several minutes on his joyride, which to me clearly indicates at least some driver-error interaction in making the whole situation worse (though a mechanical/electrical/computer problem may have initiated the cascade of failure). **And how did he stop the car eventually? By turning it off under direction of the CHP officer.

So, until a level-headed report with all these facts comes out, the take-home message: learn how to control your car in an emergency situation. CAA and Young Drivers, last I checked, offered one-off refresher lessons if you need it. Or, educate yourself: how do you turn off your car and/or shift to neutral if the throttle sticks? What happens if you do that? For most cars, there is no harm in trying, under safe conditions (i.e., no other traffic — better yet, get some friends together and rent some time on a closed track) to get up to speed, shift to neutral, and stop. Do it. Find out what happens (if anything) to your power steering and brake assist while you’re in a calm state of mind and in control of the situation. You won’t harm your car*. At the very least, look it up so you know academically.

* – probably. I wouldn’t hurt your car. But who knows what you‘ll do. ;)

If you are in this situation and want to use the brakes, apply the brakes hard and do not try to slow gradually because you will overheat the brakes and experience brake fade. Try to stop completely in one go.

One interesting twist is that the Prius (and many other newer cars) has a push-button start, rather than a conventional key-turn. That means you can’t just turn the key to turn it off, you have to push and hold the button for a few seconds if you want to power-off the car while moving (in park, you just tap the button). Now, this is the same behaviour as nearly every personal computer/cell phone/etc. on the market today. Push and hold to power off. In an interesting bit of user-interaction ergonomics, Toyota is reportedly considering adding “rapidly tapping the button” as a method to turn off the car, since that’s what people may attempt in a crisis.

Update: Someone posted a link to the 911 call at http://10newsblogs.com/audio/prius-911call.mp3 — the 911 operator does instruct him many times to shift to neutral and how to turn the car off, and he doesn’t respond. In fact, most of the call consists of her telling him to shift to neutral, and he just swears and tells her landmarks he’s passing. Don’t know yet if he didn’t hear her, if he tried and it didn’t work… but people are starting to suspect that he’s a hoax. Now I really can’t wait for a real report on the whole thing…

Later today I’ll be driving the ’97 Accord for the last time. All things considered, it has been a pretty good car: fun to drive, well-equipped, and reliable.

I found the original purchase agreement in the owner’s booklet: we bought it in January of 2000 (just over 10 years!) for $19k. We’ve put on 165k km in that time (I didn’t think the original owner did that much driving in the first 3 years — I always thought I drove closer to 20 Mm/yr!) and had roughly $8k in repairs. Maintenance is a bit tougher to estimate, but is probably somewhere around $5k. I’m getting ~$1k back as the trade-in, for a vehicle cost of $0.188/km. I don’t have fuel consumption records going all the way back to 2000, but in the last few years I’ve averaged 9.6 L/100 km overall, which at $1/L would cost $0.096/km, for a total cost of just under thirty cents per kilometre. There’s insurance, too, of course, and I’m sure my estimates here are probably missing some other costs since my record-keeping hasn’t been great.

Nonetheless, a bit of an eye-opener to the full costs of driving a car. I used to scoff at taking the train since it was $96 for a trip that only cost $32 in gas by car, but of course gas is only a fraction of the costs of driving!

Then again, the marginal cost of driving (gas, wear-and-tear) is actually fairly small, so that might not be the most appropriate accounting method. If I look at it as paying $30k (plus insurance yearly) for the privilege and freedom of being able to drive a car when and where I want, then the cost per trip is pretty low. And that’s how it works, too: once you have the car, it’s easy to use it for little trips to the store or to a friend’s house for a game of Settlers of Cataan or whatever. I’m sure it would probably be cheaper to not own a car and just use an autosharing service (or ick, a cab) for those trips that public transit and cycling won’t suit… but they have high marginal costs, which would make me not want to do them and so feel trapped (like, I wouldn’t pay $20 in cab fare to go to the grocery store and fill the trunk with stuff on sale).

Anyhow, I’m getting side-tracked. The point is that this was my first “real” car — the Prius will be my first new car, and the ’87 BMW was my first-ever car, but the Accord was the first car that was all mine (repairs and all), and not a family car that I was the primary driver on. It was the car I drove on my first date, the car we took out to PEI several times, the car that took us to our honeymoon, and the car that crawled through a freak snowstorm to bring my kitty (and me) out to London.

But now it’s an old car. The repairs are starting to mount. And the Toyota recall gives me a good entry point to drive the car of the future today. So it’s time to move on.

Against all reason though, I’m going to miss it.