Why the Ford Focus Electric is a great car for your teenager? There may be others but they are not as inexpensive and the Ford doesn’t have an insane mode. That’s the last feature you want a teen to have access to.

You will always know where they are. Well, at least you will know where the car is. You can put an app on your phone that tells you where the car is at all times.

You can set a maximum speed. You get two keys with the car. One can be programmed to set the maximum speed so if you don’t want your kid going faster than 65 they can’t.

It also has a setting where if they are not wearing their seat belt the radio volume will decrease to a level so low they won’t be able to take it.

They also have to spend a few hours somewhere recharging the battery. They can’t just run off beyond an hour or two away at a whim.

There are other cars that have many of these features but this one does it emission free and they have a zero cost for gas. You won’t ever have them asking you for money to fill the tank. All they have to do is plug in at home or work. Maybe one day schools will have free charging.

Maybe you can add that to the agenda for the next school board meeting. That is if they ever stop cutting funding to schools.

There is a saying in the life insurance industry. If insurance were bought instead of sold the commission would be 2%. Life insurance commissions are upwards of 80% of the first years premium.

Cars are sold as well. People buy far more car than they need. I’m going to expand on this post in my blog www.imreallycheap.com.

If people bought cars like airlines decide what airplane to put on specific routes our cars could almost all be electric powered.

Why airlines don’t put 747’s on every route and why you don’t need a 200 mile battery capacity.

I hear many people complain or at least I used to, they hate flying on small airplanes. Extra seats on an airplane are expensive. Larger airplanes cost more money to buy and more money to operate. They require more fuel to go the same distance.

Extra seats in your car are no different. The larger the car the less gas milage and the higher it is to buy, operate and maintain.

Do you really need a car that has more than 4 seats or has a range of more than 80 miles?

If you actually tracked your driving habits and use the odds are pretty good you would be fine with a BEV, some of you would need a car like the Chevy Volt and a few more might need a Prius V or other hybrid. Most would find you really don’t need to own the car you have. You will find that the attachment is purely emotional.

Do you know that when you fly on a commercial airliner that they usually only carry enough fuel to get to their destination and then fly another 45 minutes to an hour. Carrying extra fuel is extra weight and extra weight burns more fuel to carry it. Add up all that extra fuel and the price tag adds up.

Many of you who have pick up trucks or big SUV’s could get by very well renting them the one or two times a month you need one. If you really want to own one you can offset the cost by renting it on RelayRides.Com or if you only need one occasionally you can be the renter.

How much does having more car than you need cost you? How much extra gas and maintenance? Depreciation? I’ll bet most of you have never figured it out. All most people look at is the monthly payment.

For most people cars are an expense. If you want to accumulate assets you need to reduce expenses. A car is one place you can actually do that.

Next time you buy or lease (usually a bad idea) sit down and figure out all the numbers. And I mean all the numbers. How you use it. Where you use it. All the costs of ownership. Don’t just look at it like a potential lover.

Look at it like your going to have to live with it for better or worse. All the flaws will become apparent very quickly. The less you have invested the easier it will be to walk away from if you can’t live with it. The cheaper it is the longer you will be able to live with it if you can’t afford to walk away.

I find it interesting that people say that the Electric Vehicle (EV) will never become the norm. They cite how the GM EV1 failed miserably. Not if you ask it’s owners. Sorry, lessors. GM leased them and when the lease was up recalled every one and then crushed them despite the outcry from the people who had them.

With GM abandoning the EV enter Toyota. Toyota gave us the Prius. A car that turned out to be pretty popular but a hybrid. A part battery driven and part Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) powered. Actually mostly ICE driven. The battery doesn’t have much capacity, while it does get pretty good gas milage it runs on gas about 80% of the time unless you drive really short distances at really slow speeds.

Then Tesla Motors and Elon Musk decided to prove the concept that an all Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) could be a reality. They built a sporty, fun and really fast car that could go over 200 miles on a charge. The Tesla Roadster. Not everybody could buy one at $100k plus but Tesla sold over 2400 of them.

Musk has said that he wasn’t sure if he would make money selling Tesla’s but the idea was to spur other car makers on to build BEV’s.

It worked. Next to enter the game was Nissan with the Nissan Leaf. The LEAF was a big gamble for Carlos Ghosn. While in my opinion the Leaf is not that pretty and not worth the current price tag if you want to go all electric and are willing to spend about $22k for an S Model after the $7500 Federal Tax break you could do worse For a while you could lease a top of the line Model SL for less than $200 a month. That was a smoking deal. I know two people who who got one and one still has his past the lease end and Nissan is still taking his payments at that price. He is also leasing a Rav4 EV. The other person turned his in and is now leasing a Toyota Rav4 EV as well

Now Tesla not wanting to stop at proof of concept developed the Tesla Model S. The Tesla S is the ectomorph of the auto world. Lean and hot. Can go miles on little energy but highly demanded by Alpha Males and comes at a really high price.

Tesla is no working on a Model X but they should probably call it the DD. It going to have a larger capacity to carry more passengers and cargo. The Sexy SUV.

Anyway I digress.

Another entry into the EV market with another concept is the Chevrolet Volt. Not really a hybrid and not really a full blown BEV. It’s pretty confusing to the mere mortal how it works but the engine pretty much runs of electricity that is provided by a battery or fuel powering a generator.  Sort of like how a GM Electromotive Diesel Locomotive runs. The big advantage of the Volt over the standard Prius type hybrid engine is that you can charge the batteries by plugging in the vehicle and the “generator” won’t run until the battery charge runs down to a certain level of charge. This means you will not burn fuel at all if you drive less than 38 or so miles before recharging your batteries. Then if you can’t charge or don’t have time to charge the engine starts and generates power to keep enough electricity in the batteries to run the engine.

This is not really new technology here. Over the past 100 years or so oil has been plentiful and comparatively cheap. As long as you don’t put a cost on pollution or damage to the land.

So now we have multiple technologies that provide efficient and clean transportation why do we have so few choices.

For years the Prius was the “Green” car of choice. Not sexy and not cool or fun to drive. Not much of a choice. Until recently. Kia, Ford and even Honda have gotten into the hybrid game. And people are buying them. Not in huge numbers but you see more and more every day.

Since the Tesla came out there have been more BEV’s to choose from as well. Not just the Leaf but now we have cars from Kia (Soul EV), VW (E-Golf) and BMW (i3) just to name a few. Actually there are over 10 pure BEV’s out there now and just as many hybrids.

And I’m saving Ford for last. Ford has sort of had a different approach. Ford has the Fusion Hybrid, much like the Prius and they also have Plug In Hybrids like the Prius Plug In. They allow you to drive a few miles on pure battery power before the gas engine kicks in and drives the wheels. Still not enough miles to run most the average drivers day all electric. It’s the really safe route to dip your toes into the electric vehicle market. In my opinion a waste of resources.

Then Ford has the Focus Electric. An all electric vehicle. Actually one of the nicer ones at a reasonable price. The one I bought. So I guess I have a bias, but a very carefully thought out bias.

That’s why I’m picking the Voltec engine in the Chevy Volt and the pure BEV’s like the Tesla,  Leaf, Ford Focus to win. Hybrids and Plug in Hybrids are just the gateway drug.

But here are the current problems. Most of the pure BEV’s are either compliance vehicles sold in only a handful of States and produced in limited numbers. The Leaf is a car with a body only a very few will find attractive. The Tesla is for the top 5% on the economic ladder. That leaves the Volt. GM tried selling the Volt Tech to Cadillac Buyers. And they tried to charge $75k for it.

People who can afford an Escalade are not going to buy an EV especially a Cadillac EV. They are going to buy an Escalade. They could care less about the cost of gas or the environment.

The rest of the Cadillac customer base doesn’t know why the radio has more choices than AM stations. And the new Corvette is so much cooler. So please GM, don’t take your mistake as a given that people don’t want EV’s. The Volt would have sold much more if you had 5 seat belts even if the car doesn’t really fit 5 people. Uber won’t approve a car with less 5 seats. Neither will a Taxicab Company. Have you seen how many cabs and Uber’s are Pri-i? It will also help if you offered a model that doesn’t win CNET’s tech awards. Offer a cheap trim as well as a maxed out model. Look to how Apple markets iPhones.

For those of you that are still naysayers. Look in your pocket or on the console in front of you. 30 years ago that cellphone was so big 5 pounds of it was in your trunk and only the handset was in the passenger compartment.  It cost $1500 and about $100 a month for 30 minutes of airtime. I know because I had one in my super cool 1986 MR2. I remember telling a girlfriend that she could wait till later that evening to bitch at me cause what she had to say was’t important enough to pay a dollar a minute for.

Then just a few years later I had one of those big Motorola Bricks that you could carry around with you and look really cool. You know the one. That phone that probably gave a whole generation brain cancer. Later followed by the Flip and then the Razor only to see an iPhone or Droid in most everybody’s pocket. Even people who by Cadillacs.

What we are not seeing is a Sat Phone in everybody’s pocket. That is where Toyota and Honda are going to end up with a Hydrogen vehicle. The infrastructure that needs to be built is about as expensive as sending things into space.

Investors and car manufacture, don’t get caught with your pants down like the local phone companies. Yes, there will be a few people who still want an ICE car just like a few people still hang on to their landline. But they will be very few. It will be a lot cheaper for gas stations to add Superchargers than Hydrogen tanks. If nothing else people will still stop for a Big Gulp and 2 hot dogs for a dollar.

Maybe the Post Office should install Supercharges. Elon? A new partnership maybe. I hear email has hurt their business.

The electric utilities are already trying to make solar less attractive. Join the party. Don’t fight it. But that’s another 1500 words.

I was born in the 60’s. When I was 13, I wrote a report  for my eighth grade class on how to invest in the stock market. I was a budding young republican just like Alex Keaton (Michael J. Fox) on Family Ties.

In my report I chose to invest in a company called Tyco Labs. Why? Because they had this budding new technology that was going to free us from the strangle hold that Middle East Oil and the damage price spikes created by OPEC were doing to our economy. They went bankrupt a few years later.

This promising new technology, solar panels. That’s right solar panels. The solar panel of 5 years ago was barely changed from the one in 1973. In the 1970’s $1 a gallon gas was considered outrageous. Yet, that $1 in 1973 would buy the same amount of goods $6 buys today. So when gas topped $4 a gallon just a couple of years ago it was still cheaper than it was in 1973. And today at less than $2.50, well gas is a bargain.

So why go solar. Well, in the 1970’s it cost about $100 to produce a watt of electricity using a solar panel. Today that cost is less than $1.

So why is gas so cheap? They would have you believe that it’s because they keep finding new and vast supplies of oil. Yet, they have to drill and dig deeper or travel farther into the wilderness to get it. And at what cost? An Exxon/Valdez, BP’s Deepwater Horizon. That sounds more like a horror movie than an oil rig. Well, it was actually a horror story that is still unfolding.

We pump water and toxic waste into our land to fracture the earth so it give up natural gas. Again at what cost to the environment, our food and water. Then we burn it all and release more toxins into the atmosphere. Coal isn’t any cleaner either. Just look at China. Take all the environmental protections off burning coal and you get barely breathable air and lots health issues.

But’s it not cheap. It does bring down the cost of oil. At least the direct cost of oil. Only because of competition, not because there is a vast supply. The price is based on the alternatives. So when alternatives threaten the cash flow, oil companies and oil producers lower their prices.

They stifle technology and innovation. For years, in the case of solar, almost 40 years. So why is solar finally coming of age. Well, not because of U.S. innovation. Because other Countries are not making clean energy a political wedge issue. Other Countries don’t subsidize fossil fuels by allowing the cost of waste and by-products to be hidden in their national budgets. They tax the crap out of fossil fuels. They make the indirect costs part of the price through taxation, not hiding it through subsidies.

So why should we subsidize alternatives? Why should there be tax credits for solar panels and electric vehicles? Well to a few (very few) that’s pretty obvious. Because we already subsidize fossil fuels either directly or indirectly. Through tax credits for depletion or through military campaigns to protect our “interests” in foreign lands.

When you add up all the costs associated with fossil fuels, EV friendly power generation is far cheaper and far more efficient in producing electricity and propelling personal transportation than fossil fuels.

So don’t let the price of gas today cloud your judgement. The future price of fossil fuels is far more costly than it appears to be.

A good conservative takes advantage of every tax break available. They also conserve resources. Natural and economic.

A smart conservative will actually look past the industry sponsored “research” and find the facts.

It’s time for the U.S. to take back the lead and finish what we started almost 40 years ago.

Richie Rich

I did not think this question up on my own. This question was brought up on a episode of “Fully Charged”. In case you have not heard of or watched it you can follow this link.

There is no question that in our society that being wealthy comes with many privileges.

You live in the best neighborhoods. Have access to the best medical care and the best schools just to name a few.

There are others we don’t openly admit to like hiring the best lawyers that most likely will help you get away with many crimes a poor person would plead guilty to, or in the case of Elliot Spitzer, money allows you to buy some really hot tail.

Yet what most people would probably agree is that your wealth does not allow you to dump your garbage in my backyard. Unless you live out in the woods or desert somewhere the odds are pretty good that if you get caught dumping your garbage on my land or changing your cars oil and dumping it down the city sewer system you would be liable for damages if not criminal charges.

But, we do not only allow the wealthy to dump large amounts of waste but even the poorest among us as well. Why. Well for some reason we don’t consider the burning of fossil fuels as dumping waste. And while the average person driving a 4 cylinder Kia dumps less than the V-8 Chevy Suburban a V-12 Jaguar dumps even more.

If you had to pay for the amount of CO2 your dumped in the atmosphere like you have to pay for the amount of trash or waste water you dump in the sewer system would you drive a 12 MPG car or opt to buy the 30-40 MPG car? And yes, the wealthiest among us could drive the biggest gas burner ICE car and would have no problem paying the cost but isn’t that individual responsibility and paying for what you use?

The Carbon Tax was originally a “Conservative” idea. Because it is based on conservative values. You pay for your own actions. You don’t pass them off on to others.

And please don’t start with how electric vehicles use more resources than a gas car. How do you think they refine a gallon of gas? They use electricity. As much electricity as it takes to make 3 gallons of gas will power most electric vehicles further than the 3 gallons of gas will move your car.

Electric Cars are mostly charged at night. This is when most Utilities are running on Nuclear Power. Your utility uses their cheapest sources of energy first. See this video for an explanation. Although this is in the U.K. the principle is the same here in the U.S.

And finally. Are Electric Vehicles only for the rich? That’s a post for another day.