My daily commute — about sixty miles — plus my entry about the Smart car yesterday led me to thinking about fuel prices and how they impact my bottom line. Gas going to four dollars a gallon doesn’t make a real difference in my commuting. certainly not to the point where I would move closer to work, change jobs, or change vehicles solely for the sake of saving money on gas. So I asked myself, “Self? How much of your daily earnings would you have to spend a day before money spent on commuting forced a lifestyle change?”

Here’s the math. All of my vehicles take premium gas, at $4 a gallon. I am spending less than $11 a day on gas if I drive my Mazda to work. This is my “worst-case” scenario, as the turbocharged four-cylinder battlewagon sucks gas down at 22MPG. If I ride my BMW to work I cut my daily fuel expenditure down to $4.80. A worst, I spend far less than 1% of my daily salary on fuel.

So at what point would I start giving a shit about my commuting fuel expenditures? I am guessing that gas would have to take up 5% of my daily salary to even make a realistic blip on my financial radar. I would complain about the cost of going to work, but the money I make would more than justifies the fuel expense. There just aren’t any equivalent jobs on this side of Richmond.

I think gas would have to equate at LEAST 25% of my daily earnings before I made a significant lifestyle change. I may move closer to work because I feel like I am wasting my time spending 90 to 120 minutes a day in transit. I may buy a more fuel efficient car because I feel like it’s the “right” thing to do. I may change jobs to something closer because I am fed up with my current one. But the cost of daily driving has nothing to do with that decision. And probably won’t unless we run out of gas and it skyrockets to $50 a gallon or more.

At what percentage would gas prices make you change your lifestyle?

I walked out of my building at work about two weeks ago. I noticed that there was a bright yellow Smart ForTwo car in the visitors parking lot. I decided not to buy one after being one of the first people in Virginia that was awarded a reservation over a year ago. The ForTwo was too slow and was too inefficient for the tradeoffs of such a small vehicle. If the car could have gone over 82MPH or got more than 35 - 40MPG around town my purchase plans may have turned out differently.

Anyway, that’s not the point of my post. A week passed and I noticed a few people clustering around the ForTwo in the parking lot. They were all peering inside and gesturing, so I figured the owner was not among them. I was curious to talk to whomever bought the ForTwo to see if they shared the same reservations that I had about the vehicle’s performance on the highway. I reckoned that the owner traveled on surface streets between home and office. I never saw anyone get in or out of the ForTwo, and it never moved. I asked my manager what was up with the little yellow car in the parking lot.

“Oh, someone who was escorted out of the building last week bought it as a company car. He thought it would save fuel economy and speak to the company’s conservation image. I think it just sits there now.”

I didn’t have an immediate response other than “wow.” Those three sentences were really rich, and it’s taken me awhile to consider the implications. I found it interesting, and a little rebellious, to think that a company of 5000 people (on campus) would find merit in having even one Smart company car. It seemed more like a idyllic statement than a reality: surely it wasn’t cost effective to buy $15,000 cars for the cost savings of our motoring sales and executive force. Speaking of executives, I highly doubt the muckity-mucks upstairs would ditch their company-purchased Lexuses, Acuras, BMWs and Mercedes for a car that barely seats two. Lastly, I wondered who had the purchasing authority for a $15,000 car. It took me forever to get the latest version of Visio installed on my machine.

If you think none of this adds up to a sound business decision, you’re not alone. What is still an open question is if the person who bought the car was fired because of this car purchase, or because of other issues.

The car was gone in the parking lot today — I wonder if the company sold it or if someone is actually using it. It would be a hoot if my employer used it as a company car, especially after getting rid of the person who brought it onboard in the first place.

I put a $99 deposit down on a smart car almost a year ago. At the time, I owned my motorcycle and a Mitsubishi Montero with about 140,000 miles on it. I thought the smart car would be good for zipping around town with another person, and for doodling up to DC when the weather wasn’t nice enough for the bike. I configured my black-on-black Passion last August. Smart USA promised they’d contact me when a test-drive event was being held, and then a dealer would contact me before the end of 2007. I was excited to be one of the first people in the US to own a smart car. Smart USA was only importing around 12,000 cars in 2008, and I would be among the first 1000 people to get one.

A lot has changed since then. The most notable thing was the purchase of my 2007 Mazda3Speed turbo five-door. It’s so fantastically awesome I couldn’t imagine wanting to drive something else besides Cylon. I imagined that the smart car would be great for driving around town until I found out that it didn’t have godly fuel economy. The car gets about 40MPG in real-world driving conditions. That’s about what my motorcycle gets, but it’s not earth-shatteringly efficient enough to put up with the tiny smart body. You can get mid- to high-30s from a Honda Fit, Toyota Yaris, or Nissan Versa and get so much more room plus better acceleration and top speed. Speaking of top speed, the high end of the smart car is about 82MPH. It waddles from 0 - 60 in about seventeen seconds, which be fatally slow on the main thoroughfare in town.

I did the math on the money I’d save driving the smart vs. the Mazda3Speed. I get about 21MPG around town in the Mazda. That’s a difference of 19MPG. Both cars use premium gas, so that’s a wash. I drive about 300 miles every week, for a difference of about $50 a month on gas. I’d only save about $600 a year on gas with the smart car. I’d have to put up with a tiny car, slow acceleration and low top speed and a car payment to save $600 a year. Bleh.

To top it all off, Smart USA never contacted me for a test drive, and I didn’t hear from the regional dealer until last week. If I hadn’t bought the Mazda3Speed I might have considered it, but not now. I canceled my order. Now that I have Kaylee and Cylon the smart car was just a dumb decision.

Nothing like a new car to jumpstart the desire to keep things clean again. I have a kit in the hatch of my MazdaSPEED 3 with a quick auto detailer spray, an interior cleaner spray, two microfiber cleaning cloths, a wheel cleaner spray, a tire cleaner foam, and a dash duster. So, we have the exterior and the dash covered, but what about when I chow down on two “sausage” biscuits from McDonald’s while I am on the road? The biscuits are yum, but they get crumbs everywhere. I wanted a portable vacuum that would allow me to keep the carpet clean while I was away from home.

For $10 before shipping, the ReadiVac 36104 seemed to fit the bill. Even if it was junk, there aren’t a lot of items I can pick up for ten bucks and review for Gibberish. :)
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When Bond showed me his 2004 MINI Cooper S I liked it so much I bought one for myself. While I’m on car four since then, he’s kept his Coop in great shape.

That is, until a deer decided to jump in front of his car on the interstate last weekend.
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My uncle Nino, who has been living in Mexico for a few years, entered his modified Volkswagen Beetle in a car competition in Morelia, Mexico. Herculito (Little Hercules) competed against three hundred other cars and took first place. Here are the two pictures he sent along:

Nino has always been into custom cars. He has a Saleen Mustang back in the States, and used to shoehorn Porche engines into Beetles when he lived in Puerto Rico. One of my fondest memories growing up was when he helped me custom-paint my 1974 VW Super Beetle.

To the delight of some and the lamentations of other Gibberish readers, I have put down a $99 reservation on a 451 model smart car. I received an email from smart on Monday, asking me to confirm my choices. The process took about three minutes, and featured what I believe to be final pricing. I selected the stock Passion, with all black body components and few extras: heated cloth seats, the smart premium radio (six disc mp3-capable CD player with AUX jack), and electric power steering. The rest of the goodies I really wanted came standard with the Passion trim. Full details below.
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A really neat photo set from GeekAustin has surfaced comparing the next-generation SmartCar Fourtwo to the original version. I put a $99 refundable deposit down on a Fourtwo about two months ago. The 2007 model is apparently a little bit wider. The front headlamp assembly has been redesigned. Much to the chagrin of those who have followed the Smartcar since its inception, the dashboard is no longer angled, as you can see in this photo. For those of you wondering how a tiny go-kart of a car could go 160, keep in mind that’s in kilometers per hour; that’s about 100mph. I am not sure if you could get a SmartCar to do 100mph if you drove it off a cliff.

Anyway, I’m still very interested to see the SmartCar in person when it goes on sale in February of 2008. I believe the closest dealer to me will be in Northern Virginia. Based on my experience with the Gen1 MINI Cooper S, having a “novelty” car far from a dealer exacerbates potentially bullshit problems, like the power windows not working on MINI. If I thought driving 90 minutes each way to get my Cooper repaired in the DC metro area, I can’t imagine driving up from Richmond. February is still a long ways away.

I belong to the USA smart automotive company “insiders’ club,” which was not much more than an email list. Until today. Today insiders were allowed to put down a $99, refundable deposit two weeks before the general public on a smart Pure (the base model), the Passion (loaded), or the Passion Cabriolet convertible. The email stated prices would start at $12,000, $14,000 and $17,000 respectively.

I put a deposit on a “triple black” Passion. I’m tired of convertibles for now, and the added retractable roof mechanism weighs an extra 60+ pounds and probably eats up precious cargo space. When the car only has like 61HP to begin with, sixty pounds is a lot of weight to shed.
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Well, like a hot girlfriend with fatal character flaws, I finally got rid of Inara yesterday. The 2006 Pontiac Solstice was a gem to look at, but even on her farewell tour to meet the buyer I was put-off by how loud, uncomfortable, and unpleasant it was to actually drive her. I was reminded of how stupid the steering wheel controls were — all the stuff you don’t really mess with, like the onboard computer readout and cruise control, are on the left, and the stuff you’d play with more often, such as stereo volume and channel/track navigation, are on the right. Putting common controls on the right hand side on an American market manual transmission car is just … stupid.

This will be the first time I am car-payment free since 1996, when I bought my Eagle Talon. My plan is to ride Cylon as much as I can, taking Monty when the weather is bad or I need to haul cargo or more than one person. Hopefully Monty will carry me another 50,000 miles or so before giving up the ghost. By then I’ll have my debt situation under control to take on another car payment. Right now I’m leaning heavily towards the smART car two seater. Muhaha.