Blessed by the Potato

As I alluded to a few days ago, the accelerator pedal brou-ha-ha at Toyota may open the door for a good deal on a Prius (or, it may not, since it’s one of the few cars they can still sell). I’m going to email a few dealers for quotes tonight, so we’ll see what they say.

The Prius is a very strange and polarizing car: a lot of people have a very visceral and inexplicable dislike of the car. I’ve been surprised at the number of people who’ve said bad things about it at the merest mention that I may, at some point in the future, buy one. Pretty much all of them are myths (many of which have been debunked right here), or incomplete ideas about cost and payback (or apples-to-oranges comparisons). There are of course some valid criticisms, such as that the acceleration is not sports-car-like (it’s fast enough for a highway merge, which is all that matters to me), or that there are cheaper options if I’m focused purely on the financial aspect (I’m not — it’s one I talk about a lot, but the car has a lot of other merits). In particular, a used car would be cheaper (the hybrids keep their value too well, so it doesn’t make sense to me to get a used Prius). One of the best criticisms came from my friend Ryan who said “The thing about the Prius is this: it’s fuel efficient. It doesn’t use gas. And I make gas, so that’s bad.” [He’s a petrochemical engineer]

Nonetheless, people seem to want to criticize this car choice. I’ve made every attempt to look at it from all angles. I’ve updated my payback/savings spreadsheet with current gas prices and used a Matrix XR with automatic as my comparison car. You can download the 2010 version here if you like (or go to the Them’s Fighting Words post, which explains many of the factors that come into this kind of decision. Since gas prices have come down I’ve become more conservative with my gas price assumption, but even if gas prices stay at 95 cents/L for the next decade, the Prius will still save me several thousand dollars over a Matrix (even though the Prius is more than $5k more expensive up front!). That should handily pay for a battery replacement in the unlikely event one becomes necessary.

So we’ll see what the Toyota dealer says, but assuming they offer me a good deal, this may be your last chance to talk me out of it!

Well, the move is just about done. It took forever and was a huge pain in the ass. “One more move, and then we’re dying in that house.” Wayfare told me. I have to agree.

We hired professional movers for the big move to Toronto — no way was I going to try driving a big truck myself in the winter, or take 10 trips in a cargo van. To help our last move go smoothly we hired professionals as well, and we weren’t very satisfied: while they did get us fully moved in just a few hours and saved our backs a lot of agony, a lot of our stuff ended up scratched or dirty, and they didn’t bring the promised protective blankets, etc. So we tried looking around online for reviews before picking our movers for this round.

To my surprise, it was kind of hard to find any reviews at all for most moving companies. We ended up going with Campbell Bros, which were rated highly by the BBB. We were a little nervous at first since our contact at the company didn’t seem to understand email — we’d get one-line responses that didn’t address all our questions, and one of the quotes he gave us specified a delivery window of about 2 weeks when we were expecting a same-day move. However in person everyone was great — they not only brought the quilts to protect our furniture, they also had roll-out carpets to protect the floors that we worked so hard to get clean! They were done each half of the move in under two hours (it took me and 3 friends almost 3 hours to move just two rooms to my new London apartment). They were also really good at their jobs. It took them no time at all to realize Wayfare’s enormous desk wasn’t going to fit through the door to her office, and had the top off the desk and the door off the hinges in minutes, and then all back together again lickety-split. I think that alone would have taken the better part of the day if we were trying to move ourselves.

Moving the utilities went fairly smoothly this time around — Bell didn’t cut our phone service off a month early or anything. We did have some issues setting up the gas at the new house since apparently the old tenant wasn’t paying his bills, and Enbridge couldn’t figure out whether the gas was on or off (and it was somehow a different process to activate my account if it was off), so I had to have my mom physically go to the house before we moved in to see if there was a lock on the gas meter. Also, Rogers was offering a $30 credit if you set up your move yourself via their website. Their self-move website, naturally, didn’t work. Specifically, it told me that I needed at least 5 business days notice for my move, which I was trying to set up 12 calendar days ahead of time. So I had to call them, and they wouldn’t give me the $30 credit for trying to do it myself (though I’m going to call back again as soon as I have some time to sit down and breathe — blogging time doesn’t count).

With all the stress, all the packing, all the unpacking, plus getting used to a new place (and rewiring the phones, caulking the washroom, and all the other things we seem to do at every new place we move to) I can’t wait to never move again.

PS: To whoever rents the house after us: Congratulations, you’ve just won a free desk you can never take out of the office!

From MSN, discussing Douglas Adams, favourite quotes, and the Meaning Of Liff:

Potato: “SHOEBURYNESS (abs.n.) The vague uncomfortable feeling you get when sitting on a seat which is still warm from somebody else’s bottom”

J: “But what if you like that feeling?”

Potato: “Then you are a very strange person indeed.”

J: “Not that I do… I figure it’s usually that warm because someone let one rip before they moved.”

Potato: “I don’t think flatulence has any real effect on seat warmth.”

Holy crap, they’re actually halting sales of basically all their top models.

I’ve been trying to follow along with the Toyota accelerator pedal issue especially since I’m planning on getting a Prius soon, but I haven’t seen much solid information so far. Some cars have accelerated out of control, with one case leading to the death of four people. The stuck accelerator was blamed on human error or improper floormats which could hold the pedal down (which is basically a roundabout way of saying a combination of a pedal that’s too close to the floor, and… driver error). It was assumed that people were too panicked or didn’t have the driving skills to use their toe to pry the pedal back up when this happened… until it was a cop that was killed in a runaway Lexus. However, unless I missed a critical report along the way, they still haven’t found a mechanical or computer problem to explain the runaway behaviour, or why the braking system didn’t overpower the engine to stop the car anyway.

Out of the millions of cars Toyota has on the road, this has only happened to a few dozen — and even then, they can’t seem to agree on whether or not the problem affects the Prius (which is not under this latest stop-sale order).

Here’s the FAQ from Toyota on the latest recall.

So for me, I wonder if this might be an opportunity to get a Prius cheaper than if I waited a little longer. I’m reasonably certain that this is the last winter I’ll keep my Accord for, though it has been quite well-behaved for the last two months, even in the cold. However, it would be a bit of a shock to our finances to get a car immediately after moving, and a good couple of months before we had otherwise planned to. I’m not sure the extra ~$100-200 off would be worth it. What do you think? Will this lead to a big fire sale at Toyota? Will dealerships be deserted in the next few weeks as Toyota becomes a pariah? Or the opposite: will the Prius go out of stock as it becomes the only mid-size car Toyota is still selling?

I’m not too concerned about the accelerator issues: if it does turn out to affect the Prius, the odds seem to be in my favour, and Toyota will probably fix it not too far down the road in a recall.

Larry McDonald is giving people a sneak peek at Professor Milevsky’s upcoming book. One neat concept is the idea of a “holistic porfolio” — that you decide on your investments not just based on your risk tolerance and time horizon, but also on your human capital and career. I think I’ll add it to my summer reading list (as soon as I find my summer reading list in the move) as it sounds like a neat idea that I could get behind. Jonathan Chevreaux mentioned a similar concept in Findependence Day. So, as he says, if you’re an investment banker, maybe you should have a portfolio that is largely bonds, since your human capital is very stock-like: your job security and salary are probably closely linked with the equities market. Vice-versa, teachers are very bond-like with a stable job that is not sensitive to economic conditions, and a healthy pension to boot. So what money they invest should be largely in equities.

So, what about homeowners? On the one hand, a mortgage is like being short bonds – a negative bond, since you’re borrowing money rather than lending it. To compensate for that, Prof. Milevsky suggests homeowners should own bonds (and avoid REITs to prevent over-exposing themselves to real estate). Buying a house may also be like buying stocks because of the long-run returns, and sensitivity to economic conditions.

However, I questioned that, since I don’t think a person could expect positive after-tax returns in bonds when borrowing with a mortgage (maybe in corporates, but not by much) — you’d probably be better off paying down the mortgage. It’s important to be diversified, but does it make sense to do so without an expected return? Also, while the mortgage may be like a negative bond, to me the house itself is bond-like since it’s interest-rate sensitive and a slow, steady grower. Obviously there I’m disagreeing about houses being stock-like, and I might have to wait for the book for the full explanation of why I might be wrong. Though real estate may be best considered as its own asset class and perhaps we shouldn’t try to shoe-horn it into the bond-like/stock-like paradigm.

It promises to be an interesting discussion, so please feel free to jump over to the Canadian Business Online blog and join in with your thoughts!