Blessed by the Potato

Well, I had another $315 in car repairs this week. A connection halfway down the exhaust “rotted out” causing exhaust to leak out and the car to make a hellish noise. After driving in it for over 2 hours on the way home for the break I had a killer headache and was ready to throw up. I don’t know how the ricers/bikers do it. Anyway, all fixed up now, and it’s even quieter than it was before. Just before the new year too, so that brings this year’s total to ~$1200.

Then the oxygen sensor trouble code came back. Once again I’ve cleared the check engine light with my scangauge — the problem seems intermittent so I don’t see the need for another costly exhaust system repair just yet. It could also be unrelated to the actual sensor, and instead be an electrical problem. I got a call last week from the dealership asking me to take my car in for a recall. “Who the heck put out a recall on a 12-year-old-car?” I wondered. Turns out the recall is from 1998, so my car must have somehow missed getting repaired. Don’t know why it never came up as an issue in their computer before, though perhaps they’re just using the free recall work as a way to get me in so I’ll buy something else (other maintenance or perhaps a new car) in this slow economy. The recall relates to a wiring harness that can cause shorts in the electrical system, and I’m thinking hey, that power window won’t work because of a short in the electrical system 3 years ago that they couldn’t fix… d’oh! Looking up the recalls for my car I found another for the lower ball joints in the suspension that apparently can wear out prematurely; it was the front lower ball joints that I had to have repaired last week… I wonder if I can get any portion of that covered if the recall work was never done? This is also a good point for any used car buyers out there: we bought this car when it was 3 years old, and I have no idea if we ever checked for any outstanding recalls. I think we just assumed that that would have been covered by the safety inspection. Obviously it can’t hurt to check… but I have no idea how one would actually go about doing that. A CarFax type report might say, but I think those are more accurate for US cars than Canadian ones; the manufacturer might have a record of recall work done under warranty, and failing that a good mechanic might be able to tell you by inspection (along with a list of the recalls).

I also replaced my wiper blades again. I had done it in October, but they’re just terribly streaky, which is unacceptable in this weather. I don’t know what it is with those Canadian Tire teflon blades — they just don’t cut it, despite the fact that CT seems to think that they’re the top-of-the-line ones (or at least that’s how they’re priced and displayed). I’ve always had much better results from the CT aero-something ones (the ones that are “curved for your modern windshield” and feature the silly little flaps that press them against the windshield at high speeds). Of course, I haven’t been able to find the aero-whatevers my last few trips to CT, which is why I got the teflon ones in the first place. So this time I replaced them with the reflex ones — the kind that are just the thin piece of bent metal with the rubber blade glued on. They wipe fantastic and I’m much happier now, even knowing that I wasted $25 replacing the wipers early; it was money well spent for a lot less aggravation/lot more visibility behind the wheel. I have been avoiding those reflex type wipers for a while because I got one set when they first came out and after about 3 months the glue holding the blade on to the curved piece of metal gave out and the wiper broke. I’m really afraid of that happening again — so afraid that I’m carrying around my old wiper in the trunk just in case. I really do love how well they work when they’re in one piece, but it would help my piece of mind a lot if CT put a clip or two in to help hold the rubber on, since the wipers do face a lot of forces in extreme temperatures and I just don’t know how well that glue will hold up.

So speaking of money well spent for winter driving: snow tires = win. I found myself out driving around Toronto earlier this week with a good 3-4 cm of wet snow on the roads, including the 404. It was enough snow that pretty much everybody was realizing it was not the time for stupidity and was driving sanely; even on the highway the fastest car was only going about 60 km/h. Along Sheppard, from the 404 to Bayview, there were 3 disabled cars. One was left abandoned in the middle of the road on the eastbound hill up towards Don Mills. I know that if I was in my all-seasons from a few years ago in that I would have been sliding around at least a little and my wheels would have been spinning every time I would have had to start up from a stop, no matter how sanely I tried to drive. With the winters I was in control the whole time, though I’d still rather avoid that kind of weather if I can, so that is easily money well spent. Fuel consumption of course takes a hit in winter. The weather has been too variable to really tell if the “winter front” is doing any good, even with the instrumentation of the scan gauge, but considering the pipe insulation cost $1.47 (it cost me more in gas to get to Home Depot than the pipe insulation did!) it really doesn’t have to save much to be worth it. As a tip remember that you don’t need the cabin to be warm to drive: just start the car and drive off slowly… unless you can’t see, in which case idle as long as you please until the windshield clears!

I am continually amazed at the lack of critical thinking in the general population and the media. I know that I’m a scientist and am therefore, you know, a perfect human being, blessed with capabilities mathematical and analytical in addition to citation searchical. Ok, maybe not quite perfect, but I will acknowledge that I perhaps possess a leg up in the critical analysis department due to inclination, training, and experience. Nonetheless, I’m amazed at some of the nonsense that floats around there in the ether.

For instance, the CNW “study” that just. won’t. die. Here’s where the big disconnect between common sense and reason lead to a meme that endures. The “study” in question claimed that a Hummer used less “energy” in its total lifetime (from design to daily driving to disposal) than Prius. That is something that goes against our common sense, kind of makes us sit up and take notice. Now, what’s supposed to happen is that one’s critical thinking and reason is supposed to kick in and say “hey, this really goes against our common sense: how does a vehicle that costs more money and uses more materials up front, and also uses more gas in an ongoing fashion, possibly use less total energy? I should check this out to see if it’s a neat factoid or total bullshit.” Then a quick fact-checking mission demonstrates that this is, in fact, total and complete bullshit and the thing dies there, and anyone who brings it up is mocked as a rube. Instead, the rubes pass it on without questioning it, and the illogic only serves to help draw attention to it. “Wow, Prius sucks, I’ve got to alert the Intertubes!” Whatever happened to extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence?

I can forgive people for reading too much into patterns sometimes. For instance, nearly anyone who bothers to know anything about fuel economy knows that cars (regular cars — not talking hybrids here) are more efficient on the highway than in the city. But they have real trouble believing that driving slower on the highway saves fuel. After all, doesn’t going faster, like on the highway, save gas compared to going slower, like in the city? Ah, you point out, but there’s a point where the car is most efficient: 90 km/h, say. Going faster than that actually uses more gas. They think for a second, and the light goes on behind their eyes “Oh,” they say in a condescending way “I’ve heard that before, that’s why the speed limit was 55 in the States during the energy crisis. But that was for old cars. New cars are much better and can go faster.” Which, I have to admit, is exactly the right thought process, just the wrong result.

Likewise, for about 4 years there, housing was the best investment one could have: better than the stock market, briefly better even than oil. So you could forgive someone for lusting after a house, repeating nonsense like “priced out forever” and “renting is throwing your money away” or “real estate never goes down”. You might even forgive the same person who scoffed at the “payback period” for a hybrid car not running the same calculation for a house. The media didn’t even surprise me with their house porn and almost exclusively positive coverage of the bubble. I was, however, taken aback by the actions of our government, especially by easing the “margin requirement” (down payment) for a house. I know that they’re dumb promise-breaking neocons [ok, I won’t go there just now] and all, but still, someone should have known better. Then, as the real estate slowdown looks to finally be under way, a study comes out about the most over priced markets from UBC… and the markets it says are over-priced are not the ones people would think are over-priced. This is because of how they did their analysis: they included in their valuation a measure of how much a market has gone up since the last cycle: markets that went up more are not considered to be “bubblier”, but rather, more fairly priced in their estimation since they’re counting on further rapid increases. So the cities with the most rapid increase in prices are supposedly the ones that are less overvalued…

I recently chewed into Netbug about a post of his on environmentalism. He was arguing that man couldn’t cause global warming because, as a documentary that aired on BBC4 argued, we can’t compete with the sun. That’s just the sort of thing that’s great at misleading people (even otherwise smart people capable of Googling, like Netbug) — it has just enough ring of truth to it to make you believe it. This documentary makes a number of points which are true, but not important or worse, wrong-headed. Then it sprinkles in some minority opinions, a fair helping of conspiracy theory (global warming is a conspiracy by Maggie Thatcher to break the unions! Scientists take the dirty british money, but not the money of oil companies — no, if they did, they’d be richer and wouldn’t be doing some slumdog documentary film!) and some selective editing to sucker people in. Then Netbug finished off his post with a statement about how stupid the environmentalism movement has gotten with a clip from Penn & Teller about circulating a petition to ban water at some green rally, and all the people who signed it. Of course, that says less about the environmental movement in general, and more about people’s willingness to sign something they didn’t fully read or understand while at a rally.

When I first “made up my mind” to buy a Prius (in quotation marks because I obviously don’t have a Prius in my driveway now, so my mind couldn’t have been that made up), it was because my car had been stolen and even though it was recovered it wasn’t pleasant to drive anymore — I was constantly reminded of the violation. It was also because it was 10 years old and starting to act its age. In 2006, it incurred over $4000 in repairs, and I really doubted it was worth that much in the first place. In 2007, another $1000 in repairs, plus an estimate for $700 in repairs that I decided to defer (good choice so far — both those parts are still going strong). 2008 however has been fantastic. Repairs so far haven’t broken $200 (not counting scheduled maintenance), and I was starting to think that my car was getting through it’s mid-life crisis and I might be one of those Honda owners who gets 15 or 20 years out of their car. I was getting so hopeful I even took the down payment I had saved up and put it in the market.

Unfortunately today I took my car in to the tire shop for a routine rotation + alignment, and they said they “weren’t going to waste [my] money with an alignment — your lower ball joints are loose and it’s going to be $550-$600 to repair”. Now I’ve known for a little while that some suspension work was coming for my car. In the summer it’s fine, but it makes a heck of a squeak going over all the potholes in the alleyway once the temperature dips below zero, so I suspect that once they start looking closer at the ball joints they’ll find double that amount of repairs to do.

Oh well, if it’s not repairs on an old car, it’s payments on a new car, and I can at least console myself with the fact that if the depression does hit, I can always park the car and not pay for repairs, but if I were to get another one I’d have to pay the loan off no matter how much I avoided driving.

It looks like a lot of people these days are choosing to keep their cars longer. It doesn’t look like the amount people drive has changed all that much, but new car sales are way, way down, leading to the Detroit 3 to look for handouts/bailouts. It’s amazing how much they’ve shot themselves in the feet over the years with cheap credit and leases. As Derek DeCloet points out in a recent Globe article:

“The Detroit Three spent years training their customers not to buy vehicles without a subsidy – usually in the form of 2-per-cent or zero-per-cent loans. They also taught them not to bother saving for one, because no down payment was required. (Your columnist, when buying a Pontiac Vibe five years ago, was practically admonished by the salesman for putting $2,000 toward the purchase. Didn’t I have a better use for the money, he wanted to know?)”

So with the days of a zero-down lease/financing over with, it’s going to take time for new car sales to come back because people are going to need a few years to start saving up for those down payments again. On top of that, the Detroit 3 have been existing in this perverse parallel economic universe for some time now: their quality has been coming up, but mostly when measured by short-term surveys, “initial quality”, etc. The perception that their quality, especially the long-term reliability, is still low, and so for the most part they compete based on price. However, they don’t have the advantage in terms of margin AFAIK: their labour costs are higher, their “legacy” costs are higher, and for GM in particular, they have a lot of duplication selling the same crap in a ton of very slightly different trims under different badges. That’s a bad position to be in, and I’m actually amazed it lasted for as long as it did. Now with people suddenly interested in keeping their cars longer, and needing more predictability in costs (they can’t tap their HELOC for a costly surprise repair) long-term quality is going to play even more of a factor.

This is again a spot where they have perhaps shot themselves in the foot when it comes to their hybrid programs. The Honda system is simple: the belt-and-cone CVT may be fragile (we’ll need some time to see if that’s really the case), but the hybrid implementation is very simple, and will actually work on engine power alone even if the motor/battery dies (though the engine is perhaps more likely to die than the motor — and given that we’re talking about a Honda engine, that’s not likely). The Toyota/Ford system has been poo-pooed all over for requiring the battery to work to run, but beyond that it’s actually a pretty elegant transmission system that should be quite durable. The only issue I’ve heard with it is that it might not have sufficient cooling, which might be one reason why you’re not supposed to tow with a Prius (note that you can tow with a HiHi or FEH). The system GM developed, it’s “two mode transmission” is like two GM transmissions frankensteined together, with four clutches throughout (I am lead to believe that the clutch is a common point of failure in GM transmissions). It’s a system designed primarily for large trucks (the Tahoe hybrid and Escalade hybrid), which indicates that clearly GM was hoping to continue marketing large trucks based on <5 years of ownership even in a future where a hybrid system was deemed necessary. At the same time, GM and Ford stopped making minivans, so if/when those soccer moms who “need” 3rd row seating want something that sucks a little less fuel, they’ll go to the competition for a minivan.

I’m pretty sure that just because of how many people are employed by the automakers and their sub-industries that they’ll get a bailout from governments — the American government if not ours — but I hope that they actually manage to change into companies that can compete in a world of high gas prices and tight credit. I hope it’s not just going to be used to supply their burn rate for another 6 months or a year when they’ll be back in the same position. I also hope that Toyota and Honda — who are equally foreign automakers in Canada and who also employ a lot of Canadians — don’t get completely screwed by the bailouts.

Things are bad in the automotive sector. GM and Chrysler seem to be circling the drain, and Ford is not far behind. Toyota’s profits were down massively, though it was still at least a profit.

The “domestic” automakers are approaching any government they can for bail-outs, and it gets me thinking. If they’re nearly bankrupt anyway, and our government is going to foot the bill (and is owed hundreds of millions in dollars in loans already)… why not buy out (or repossess) a few different Canadian factories from different automakers and create a Crown corporation to make Canadian cars? It would give the government the stability in the auto sector that they seem willing to pay through the nose to get, and without the leasing/executive arm, there might even be some decent cost savings (though CAW would probably just rape a government negotiator). Plus the government can fast-track those hybrids it kept trying to get the automakers to build in Ontario.

If you’ll recall way back to 2006, the Ontario govenrment was quietly trying to get the car manufacturers to build hybrids in Ontario. CTV broke the story of Ford agreeing to build their Edge hybrid here before Ford had finished designing it (and the long-promised edge and fusion hybrids still aren’t on the market). Ontario offered R&D assistance, too. Part of it was to encourage more activity to take place here, but a good part of it was to foster a move away from guzzlers. The government was offering to pay up to $10 million, which would be matched funding of 1/3 for any research or design project into alternative fuels and transportation, where the research was conducted in connection with an Ontario university. I don’t have the exact results of that program, but I recall that none of the automakers took the government up on their offer.

All this leads me to think that just maybe the Ontario government is more qualified to run a car company than the yahoos running GM, Ford and Chrysler.

Well, my ScanGauge arrived today. That was incredibly quick since I only ordered it on Tuesday, and all the good things I’ve heard about the service from Tom Gifford (who resells the ScanGauges in Canada through Gifford automotive) is certainly true — he was quick and friendly to respond to emails, and had shipped my ScanGauge the same day I ordered it. The ScanGauge II was incredibly easy to hook up and pull the codes from my car — just plug in, turn the car on, wait ten seconds, press “scan” and voila! The hardest part was finding my ODBII connector in the first place. Turns out it was hiding behind the ashtray. Unfortunately that means that if I’m going to use the ScanGauge on a daily basis (as a fuel consumption gauge), I’m going to have to do without my ashtray/coin collector. I’ll put up another post in a few weeks after I get some more experience with the ScanGauge as a fuel consumption/extended gauge.

For now, I can just say that it was such a piece of cake to pull the codes out of the computer that it’s downright criminal of the dealership to have charged me $90 just to do that at one point — two codes cleared and the ScanGauge will pay for itself. The code is, once again, P0133 — O2 sensor/air flow sensor “slow response”. So from what the mechanic told me last time, this will eventually need to get fixed, but “slow” is not yet “none” — and indeed, it took 8 months for the code to be set again after it was cleared in January. The repair estimate was $365, so I’ll just take my chances at the Drive Clean test, and if it doesn’t pass, I’ll just have to pay up then.

Of course, I knew about the ScanGauge long before I had to deal with trouble codes because of it’s reputation as a fantastic fuel consumption meter. I think all cars should come with a fuel consumption meter, but unfortunately they don’t. I’ve been tracking my fuel consumption by the tank every time I fill up with the help of the database at GreenHybrid.com, which certainly helps with giving me an idea of how I’m doing and factors (speed, cold) that can affect fuel consumption. However, it’s still a pretty rough guide, and a tool like the ScanGauge can hopefully offer some feedback to improve my driving even more (if only to remind me those rare times when I am in a hurry how much it’s costing me). It can also display other information contained within the car that the stock gauges don’t show me, such as battery voltage and fuel range remaining.

Picking where to place the ScanGauge is a bit tricky, since I want somewhere that’s not in my way, but also immediately visible, and I have to manage the cord. It needs a decent contact with some surface in my car for the velcro, and also has to point somewhat towards me so I can read the screen. On top of that, I have to try to angle the pictures so that everyone doesn’t see just quite what a disaster my car is these days. Right now I’m thinking either on the steering wheel column in front of the dash display (and despite the angle I took the picture at, I can see over the ScanGauge to see all my instruments when sitting in the driver’s seat), or just above the radio, fastening the velcro to the dummy switch beside the clock. On the steering wheel is of course the best visibility, but it’s a little harder to hit the buttons (I have to reach through or behind the wheel). Beside the clock it’s kind of low and out of sight, and it’s also just a bit too wide for that space so it looks a little goofy. It does fit really snugly into the space left behind by the ashtray, which also makes the cable a non-issue since it’s all just coiled in behind there, but it’s barely visible there — in park, I can’t see half the display, and it’s low enough that it’s a head movement when driving, not just an eye-movement glance. Other options are between the clock and air controls, but that space is not very flat.

I figured what the heck, glue-backed velcro is not all that expensive, and put it beside the clock/above the radio for now. It’s not the most professional looking installation, but I also didn’t drill any holes in my dash to run the cord. I then took it on a short spin to see how it would do. It’s a pretty decent spot: I can glance down at it quickly while driving, but it’s out of the way enough that the light doesn’t really bother me while I’m driving (though if it does, I can always just turn it off). I got about 10.5 L/100 km according to the ScanGauge in a 10 km drive around London in light traffic, which is about what I expect in those conditions. Next up will be seeing how I can use it to improve my driving (e.g.: finding how much of a fuel hit driving 100-110 km/h on the highway takes).

Oh, did I mention it changes colours?