{"id":2241,"date":"2010-02-08T21:09:42","date_gmt":"2010-02-08T21:09:42","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2010-02-08T21:10:26","modified_gmt":"2010-02-08T21:10:26","slug":"cars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2241","title":{"rendered":"Cars"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\"NGV_small.JPG\"<\/form>\n

\nWe went car-buying on Friday.<\/p>\n

The last time was in 2006, when we sold our minivan and bought a Civic Hybrid.<\/p>\n

We didn’t want a Prius, because TG has an irrational (or given recent news, entirely rational…) dislike of Toyotas, and I didn’t like the idea of a ‘statement’ car. We bought it, first and foremost, for the HOV lane stickers, but also because I thought it was neat technology, and because I do think that cutting back on our energy consumption in non-hair shirt ways is a good thing to do.<\/p>\n

Note that I really don’t see hybrids as all that environmentally benign, so our plate – ECO FROD – reflected that.<\/p>\n

Well, at the end of this year, the HOV stickers on hybrids expire, and probably won’t be renewed, and we’ve put 60,000 miles on ours with decent – not great, not terrible – results. We had to replace the main battery (warranty) but it was brain damage to get the local dealer – Scott Robinson Honda, who does Honda’s fleet cars (American Honda is here in Torrance) struggled for a bit to deal with the driveability problems caused by the dying battery, but once I escalated they were great in getting it all dealt with.<\/p>\n

So – no stickers soon, a car with hypercomplex technical systems and a so-so support chain. Sounds like time to reconsider what we’d do.<\/p>\n

I kicked the issue over to my frugality friend at Downturn Living, and she and her readers were clear that the frugal, economically sensible thing was to keep the car.<\/p>\n

So of course we decided not to.<\/p>\n

Instead, this Friday, we bought a new 2009 Honda Civic GX – a natural gas powered car.<\/p>\n

I was initially kind of anxious about a NGV – just that the logistics of refuelling are more complex (there are some 26 fuelling stations in the parts of Southern California where we typically go – and I worry that TG, who tends to run her vehicles on fumes would wind up getting towed.<\/p>\n

But I put them all into a map and loaded it into our Garmin, and so far – after 4 days and 300 miles – it’s been pretty darn easy.<\/p>\n

Home filling stations are (sort of) available – the Phill brand went BK and may be releaunched – but I’m unsure of the economics for someone who drives as little as we do. We do long trips, and the odds are that we’ll be renting more for that – I’d guess that 10K of the hybrid’s miles are on road trips.<\/p>\n

And the new car is interesting – really downmarket and defeatured compared to our hybrid, which not only has a leather interior but is in a far higher state of trim. It’s a real fleet car…just the basics. We’ll invest in a decent stereo and leave it at that, I’m thinking.<\/p>\n

We bought the car through our credit union’s car-buying service, and got a great deal on it. Thanks to Jeff Wyrick and Auto Expert Online…and over the next year or so I’ll report on our experience with it.<\/p>\n

Back in the 70’s I read Amory Lovin’s Soft Energy Paths<\/a> and noted his belief in building out a NG infrastructure as a transition plan to hydrogen. It made sense to me then…we’ll see if it makes sense now.
\n–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Armed Liberal buys a natural gas car…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2241"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2241\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}