A promise that I can't keep?I promise that my first new car will not run on petroleum.
- silpheed, circa 2002
Seems naïve, doesn't it? I wasn't always a cranky loser. There was once a time when I thought that the world was a sparkling pearl trapped in an oyster, of course now I know that the world is an oyster trapped in a fat plumber's arse crack. I felt the least that I could do was to not help turn my planet into a violent sauna.
I wasn't a total babe in the woods though, I left myself an escape clause. That promise applied to my first new car, I could buy all the old exhaust-spewers that I liked and still keep my word. I didn't, but it goes to show that I was as much of a weasel then as I am today.
Years went by and we all know the rest of the story. Electric cars were laughed at, no-one wanted NASA's fuels cells and it turned out that hydrogen cars needed nuclear power stations to create their fuel. Oh, the irony.
My moral grandstanding has bitten me in the arse and left me carless for all this time. I've done well to keep my promise so far, but can I keep it going? My god it really is tempting to break my promise. I've been lent a car for the last two weeks and it's really come in handy. Buying a car is no problem, these days banks give credit to any moron, but does it make sense to buy a car? Luckily, I completed high-school maths. Let's say I bought a cheap new car...
Cost: $18,000
Interest rate of loan: 10%
Life of loan: 3 years
Years owning car: 6 years
Petrol: $30/week
Other expenses: $400 yearly service, $1,000 yearly rego and insurance
Resale value: $4,000
Formula: ((18000 * (1 + (0.1 * 3))) + (400 * 6) + (1000 * 6) + (30 * 52 * 6) - 4000) / 6
Owning a new car and then selling it 6 years later comes out at costing me $6,193 a year. I know that formula is a little off, but applying compound interest would double its length and not change the final figure too much. I think I've been very lenient with the petrol cost too. Let's try public transport...
Cost: $82/month
Formula: 82 * 12
That comes out at $984 a year. Winner! Would I pay the $5,000 difference between public transport and owning car just for convenience sake? A lot of people do, but there are some that don't. When I look at the people that I share the bus to work with, half of them are professionals. Have they found the secret to saving a bucketload of money? Even if they have, I have no problem with buying convenience. My problem with cars is purely environmental.
I shouldn't have to settle for a choice between inconvenience and breaking my word, maybe there's a third way. Hybrid cars are starting to be asked for by the public. Toyota have a great little earner with their Prius, even if it is because people are more concerned with how much petrol costs rather than the damage that vehicle emissions do. Human greed can do a lot of good sometimes, it's an emotional tool like any other. Maybe it's time that I woke up to myself.
I promise that my first new car will not run solely on petroleum.
- silpheed, 2007
Mmm i wish public transport was a viable option to me in this hick town. I have an OLD car, i was thinking of buying a new car, but ur maths pretty much convinced me not to. I think I'll buy a motorbike though. Heck is uses a lot less fuel, therefore less emissions.. right? Maybe thats your out silp. Buy a $18000 motorbike :D
I think we also did this equation, and found that given the higher public transport costs in other states, and the likelihood of simply buying a second hand car for $5000 or so rather than a brand spanking new one that most of us can't afford, it was actually more viable to buy a car (all environmental considerations aside)
We proved you wrong, remember?
I wish I kept logs :(
the extra 5k a year can (to a point, depending how you look at it) be translated to, say, the extra hour or two a day you don't have to spend waiting for a bus, getting to a bus, etc (in canberra, it took me 2-3x longer to get somewhere simple like uni). it's different for everyone, but an extra hour of sleep a day (as a poor example) could certainly be worth the $5k.
convenience doesn't end with the morning and night transit, but there's things like.. taking couches to the tip. orrrr, driving to sydney for a band. more money spent in that, too, but it's about quality of life or some such. if money was an issue, i'm sure you'd be living south of bonython or some such. in a cardboard box.
no matter what, there's always ways to save money to sacrifice quality of life. each to their own. i still like to have my car, even if i only drive it twice a week.
for those that care, the chat log that aph refers to was a quick comparison that we did between buying a new car and taking a taxi everywhere. the new car won in the long term and the taxi won in the short term, the break even point was around 3 years. of course, there's no environmental benefit in taking a taxi everywhere.
i'd happily sacrifice money for convenience, and someday i will.
I own a car, I rarely drive it - parking is too expensive in the city so on the 5 days of the week I'm working it isn't an option to drive - not an affordable option anyway.
I catch a bus to work most of the time because it's so much cheaper than driving. Other times I ride mrs skuzzer's scooter to work, which costs me $6/fortnight in fuel and takes about one third of the time catching the bus takes (including time spent getting to/from bus stop). I can park for free, I can lane split to get past the peak hour traffic.
Oh and scooter rego is about $63/yr.
Limit your greenhouse emissions by not actually going anywhere. Saves a lot of money too. You might not actually be able to enjoy the environment you're trying to save, but at least you'll be able to enjoy the smug knowledge you did your bit to preserve it...
Honestly, i doubt anything we're doing now will have so much of an effect on the environment that it will affect YOU in your own lifetime. Nothing that happens to the earth and the rest of the multi-verse after you die has any impact on you, and making decisions based on these speculated outcomes is illogical. Due to the nature of the stellar life-cycle, the sun will eventually expand to the point where the earth with become so super-heated it won't sustain life, just like Mercury now. Eventually the sun will go nova and take out the entire solar system with it. If you think the big-bang theory is more probable than the steady-state theory, then you have to admit that eventually there'll be a big crunch and EVERYTHING will be destroyed... But you'll still be dead and will have been for millenia and will continue to be for the rest of eternity. Nothing that happens the day after you die matters any more than than the death of the universe, so exactly what is the point in being concerned with environmental issues that won't affect you personally in your own lifetime? Oh it will affect your kids? If you're environmentally conscientious you won't HAVE ANY, due to overpopulation being the simple single cause for environmental woes. Not to mention that your kids lives after you die will again have no affect on you personally, although having your mind set at ease at the thought that they will grow up safe and happy in an environmentally sound future nirvana must add to your quality of life, however fucking deluded it might be.
But then again, if you really just want a cool electric car, be a man and roll your own :) Ever bought a new car battery? Expensive aren't they? That guy's vehicle has ELEVEN. And no, he's not saving any more in run costs using electricity over petrol.
The most practical solution in all of the options available, and taking cost into consideration, is a diesel-powered vehicle. Diesel engines are more efficient than petrol engines (and yet our govt. taxes diesel higher than petrol for some reason). Unless you have access to (usually more expensive) "green power" to charge your electric/hybrid vehicle, you're using more electricity generated by our lovely coal-fired friends. Coal is a very inefficient fuel and creates 1kg of CO2 greenhouse gases per usable kWh, which is as much or more than the average car petrol engine. This is to say nothing of the energy expenditure and environmental impact of manufacturing the vehicle - electric cars (not hybrid) actually produce the most CO2 during manufacture in comparison to other options, according to this study.
If you wait around for hydrogen fuel cells, you'll have to remember that the 99.99% pure hydrogen you need to run them is probably going to be manufactured using steam reformation of petrochemicals, the byproduct of which is carbon monoxide, which oxidises in the atmosphere to our old greenhouse friend CO2, lol. The prcocess uses a lot of energy too, coming once again from your coal-fired plants. This is to say nothing of the prohibitive cost and limited access of fuel cells. The first commercially viable fuel cells will be direct methanol, not hydrogen, and they're more suited to powering laptops than they are to powering cars.
You could always ride a bike - but then, as previously mentioned, you can't pack a drum kit into the back of a bike, or get down with Mrs Greenpeace in the back seat of one. (unless you have circus-performer-like balance, in which case you should take that show on the road and make some cash!)
Holy crap, I'm not reading all that. I'd go natural gas before I'd go diesel, some of the buses here in Canberra run on that.
I drive daily to work on a diesel car. 1.5 hours average daily. My office sits in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by ducks and bulb fields. I wish I had a bus to take me there. That time could be spent reading interesting articles about green house effect, or how to improve my masturbation techniques.
Do you like feeding the ducks?
And yeah i forgot about gas. It's also a good practical solution, although it's kind of pussy. Real Men drive engines that use the heat produced from sheer compression alone to detonate their fuel. A big fuck-off turbo-diesel 4WD for preference, with all-round beefy bar work to clean up those wayward roos and 6 year-olds. Don't just commune with nature... CONQUER it!
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