Blessed by the Potato

It’s not hard to see from my previous posts that I’m a fan of electrified transportation (which is a pretentious way to say electric cars and PHEVs). So I’m generally in favour of the announced rebate for electric cars in Ontario. These sorts of rebates are great ways to get the cars into the hands of early adopters — if you can bring the price difference of the desirable technology down to the point where there isn’t a significant premium over equivalent cars, it makes it a lot easier for people to swallow their doubts about the new technology and get out there to beta-test. A few people will be willing to take the chance on the new models, but certainly not everyone, not until there’s a decade or so of real-world data, and to get that you need as many early adopters as soon as possible. It also helps draw attention to the technology so people will look into it (free advertising, basically).

I’ve seen some arguments about the rebates cropping up on the net, and I’ll address some points, but first a few of my own:

– I think it’s coming too soon. In July 2010 there will be basically zero electric cars available — maybe the Volt will see the light of day, maybe the Tesla Model S will be starting to deliver to people on the waiting list and ready for regular buyers… but that’s about it until 2011 or later. In that light it does seem less like a “electric car rebate” and more like yet another “Government Motors handout”. I mean, even if they do manage to get the Volt/Model S out in 2010, face facts, they’re almost going to California dealers anyway — delaying the onset to 2011ish to give other manufacturers a chance to catch up would be decent.

– Like I said, generally, this sort of thing works. It may not be the best use of the money, but getting people to switch to electric cars will reduce smog in the downtown core (and greenhouse gasses, and possibly help stabilize the grid). However, where electric cars work best is in urban areas where people commute every day… and if you’re going to spend money to get people to stop smogging up downtown Toronto/Ottawa, why not instead put the money towards under-funded public transit? (My answer, to myself: because there probably won’t be even 500 cars sold per year under this program, and 5 mil is a drop in the bucket to the TTC, so we can do both).

The Globe’s auto editor had this to say in favour of the subsidy:

The Americans have put in place a $7,500 US subsidy for alternative propulsion vehicles like the Chevy Volt. The Volt is a plug-in hybrid, though General Motors calls it an extended range electric vehicle. The U.S. subsidy mean Canada simply must keep up here.

This is absolute rubbish. In fact, if the Americans are doing it, that’s a perfectly good reason for us not to — now we know that someone will get the cars in the hands of the consumers so we get that precious kick-start to industry and the real-world data (though of course, that won’t be quite the same as real-world Ontario winters).

Now, if you want to argue that we should support the manufacturers to bring jobs here, then ok, cool, that keeping-up-with-the-Jones argument works… but a consumer rebate does not get Tesla or GM to build an Ontario factory.

One way that the main goals of this could be accomplished for free is a CARB/CAFE type legislation: force the automakers to have a certain percentage of electrics/hybrids and a certain overall fleet fuel economy. If they miss their targets by selling gas guzzlers, you fine them (and unlike CAFE, make them real fines). Then the manufacturers will have to raise the prices of the gas guzzlers and sell their fuel efficient models as loss-leaders to make their efficiency ratings… the quasi-free market at work.

It’s a subsidy for the rich — these cars will cost $30k and up.

I don’t have a good answer to that… does it matter to the government incentive program that the pollution reduction will come from “rich” drivers? Most new-car feebates work that way, but in theory the subsidy should trickle-down as lower resale prices for the people who will buy the cars used.

[Poor] transit-riders or cyclists, who are way greener, will be subsidizing expensive cars…

Ah, but they’re electric cars.

We have made-in-Canada electric cars that aren’t eligible for any kind of government help — they’re not even legal on Ontario roads!

Yes, the Zenn situation is somewhat tragic. The government doesn’t seem to be looking hard enough to create a neighbourhood electric vehicle standard… but even if they were road-legal I’m not sure that they should be getting subsidies because that’s the model we want to move away from with electric cars: we want cars that are better than gassers. Safer as well as more efficient.

Although I am sure rebates will work to increase sales of electric cars, I believe preferential treatment to drivers of electric cars will provide better incentive.

That’s a good point — part of the reason why California has more hybrids than other states is that for a number of years they were allowed to use the carpool lanes (and park for free in some cities). Free/priority parking is likely to be as much of an incentive as the cash, and HOV access might be too, if you happen to live in one of the few places in Ontario that has HOV lanes.

Permalink.

Well, it looks like my poor maligned Accord is nearing the end of its life.

So far this calendar year I’ve had about $1000 of work done on it: ABS Sensor, $450; Battery, $140; Wheel bearing, $390.

And while fixing the wheel bearing today they found an oil leak around the cam, which will be something like $1100 to repair, and that for some reason my brake rotors aren’t wearing evenly, so they’re suggesting $350 to take them off and re-machine them back flat. This is on top of the non-critical repairs I’ve already been deferring: the oxygen sensor that was acting up a fair bit last year (which prompted the purchase of my scanguage to clear the codes), and the leaky radiator. Actually [touch wood], neither of those have been a problem since the snow melted. I went through about a litre of coolant due to the leak in the radiator in the winter, and rightly figured that such a small leak was worth watching rather than replacing the radiator right away. Now that summer’s here, the leak has stopped completely (thermal expansion sealing something better?). The oxygen sensor tripped the CEL a few times through the winter as well, but always kept working fine after clearing the code, and likewise, hasn’t bothered me since the return of the warm weather. Both of those “pending” repairs have estimates of about $375 from the shop if I need to do them. If we include those I’m looking at $2200 of repairs “soon”, on top of the $1000 I’ve already spent this year.

The wheel bearing pisses me off, though. I had all four wheel bearings replaced between 175 and 200 Mm: they just kept failing, one after the other. At the time the car was 10 years old, I figured that was just life, and at least the new ones would last another ~200 Mm. But I’m not quite at 250 Mm; that’s at most 70,000 km on this wheel bearing, which is kind of disappointing. More worrying is the thought that the other 3 might fail in the next year or two: while the rears weren’t too pricey, the fronts were like $1400 each to replace!

This is all part of having an older car though: it costs money to repair. At some point the repairs get to be too much, and it’s time to replace the car. Exactly when to do that is a bit fuzzy: I’m already at the point now where the (proposed) repairs for the year are more than the car is worth, but the repairs are still not as expensive as the payments on a new car would be, which is further compounded by the fact that a nearly-worthless car is about 1/3 the cost to insure. And it may be naive, but I can always hope that the flurry of repairs could be over for a year or two: after all, the oxygen sensor and the radiator have been going along fine for a year now, and the oil leak isn’t hugely pressing at this moment. And since I’m in the fortunate position of not needing my car, I can afford to just keep driving it until the next repair does crop up. None of what I’m deferring is likely to get very suddenly worse, to the point where I’ll be stuck by the side of the road, but if it does I could wait until I find and purchase a replacement since the car isn’t essential to my every-day life.

Hopefully I’ll be able to squeeze just one more winter driving season out of it… though now I think I know my threshold for calling it quits when the next repair does crop up.

You know, it’s kind of a miracle that we have clean water coming right into our houses that we can get any time we want.

… and the London public works makes sure that we never take that for granted for very long…

As I sit here, trying to clean the watermelon juice off my keyboard while it’s dripping down my arms to the elbows, I realize that watermelon is a very descriptive name for a fruit.

It’s a very wet melon. I don’t think I could have come up with a better name for that particular fruit.

It makes me think of oranges, which sound like they have a descriptive name, but it’s actually not. After all, if you’re thinking of a fruit you want to eat, the colour it happens to be is probably not high on your list of criteria, so it’s not a very useful attribute to describe the fruit or name it after. And of course there’s the added confusion that not all oranges are orange (with the sudden popularity of blood oranges driving that home).

We went to see Up yesterday at the movie theatre. It looks like it would be a fun movie, and has been getting very good reviews. Unfortunately when we showed up at the theatre, it turns out it was still in 3D (despite being out for a few weeks now), and I have zero interest in paying more to try to fit some flimsy plastic glasses over my prescription glasses and get a headache just so that some cheesy 3D effects can be thrown in.

So we saw Public Enemies instead, which looked like it might be a decent summer-time popcorn muncher from the previews.

It’s not. The movie is just not good. It’s full of weird camera angles, and just drags. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of character development, no backstory to anyone, and with one or two exceptions, the action scenes weren’t even any good.

I read the Wikipedia entry on John Dillinger, and there’s a lot of good stuff in there that they missed. Right at the beginning they mined the “crook with a heart” thing with the line “put that away, we’re here for the bank’s money, not yours.” But then that was sort of it for showing any charm during a robbery. Apparently later on, he robbed a bank without a shot by pretending to be a movie director making a bank heist scene — wouldn’t that have made for a good scene??

The movie was also lacking any sort of Depression-era feeling. Sure, the costumes and cars and tommy guns all looked great, but everything was shiny. We didn’t see the desperation and the unemployment and the crop failures that helped contribute to the massive crime wave that lead to the formation of the FBI. With these public enemies it wasn’t really desperation driving them to rob bank after bank, but it was still something I noticed was missing from the movie.

On the whole, the movie had the feel to it that we were supposed to have read the book first or something, since there wasn’t a lot of development or exposition.

Of course, part of my enjoyment of the movie could be due to the foul mood I was put in by the person beside me talking incessantly for the first ~20 minutes or so. Talking, not whispering. I actually turned around and told him to shut up, and rather rudely at that. It was annoying me so much — he was louder than the movie for a number of spots! — and anyone who knows me knows that’s never happened before… I’m actually still kind of shocked at my behaviour myself.