Over the last few months, it’s felt like we’ve been homeless. Not “sleeping on the street” homeless, of course, but more on the “man without a country” sense. Or “man and woman without a state”, to be more precise.

It all started with our round of interviews to Gemini Falls and Arapaho. It was followed a week or so later with another trip to Gemini Falls. Then we had our trip back to Delosa for Thanksgiving, a couple weeks back in Cascadia, then another couple weeks in Delosa for Christmas. Coming later this week is another trip to Arapaho. If all goes well, we’ll be back here for a month or two packing to move. Otherwise, expect another spate of interviews.

Don’t get me wrong. I love visiting my family and have greatly enjoyed my time back in Delosa. I’ve also enjoyed our trips for the interviews and am looking forward to giving Dent County, Arapaho, a longer, harder look. And even the impending move, painful though it will be in terms of stress and headaches, will land us in our next and perhaps permanent destination.

But it’s all extraordinarily exhausting. Trips to the airport, multi-hour drives across the interior northwest and across Delosa. In cars without MP3 players, in some cases! I know, cry my a river, but you get used to certain things. I barely have time to get settled in anywhere before we’re about to go somewhere else. Even during our two-and-a-half week trip to Delosa, we split our time between Colosse, Beyreuth (where her family lives, on the other side of the state), Genesis (her ancestral home), and Ephesus.

It’s also created some logistical problems. I can’t really order things because I don’t know if we’ll be in Soundview when the package arrives. Further, anything I order may just have to be boxed up in a couple of weeks and so I’m disinclined to replace the faulty wireless keyboard, get new batteries for the laptops, and so on. Two of the really nice things about being unemployed was that it was easy to stay well-rested and that I could receive packages.

Assuming that Arapaho works out, it’ll be the case that Soundview will never be “home” again and that it will retroactively ceased having been so about four months ago. In the meantime, I got back from Arapaho earlier this week. Next week or the week after, it’s off to Arapaho.

Clancy’s Toyota Camry has a bit of a leak on the passenger side rearview tail light. It’s a small crack up top. Not even a damage crack… it’s just a bit displaced. Just displaced enough to let water in and short out the tail light. It seems likely that I can tape over the little crack, but I don’t know what kind of tape to use.

Duct tape seems kind of harsh.

Packing tape does not seem harsh enough.

Electrical tape seems like it could work, but I’m not sure it’s wide enough to get a really good hold on both sides.

Clancy mentions seeing some sort of tape that people put over their tail lights that’s translucent but also (apparently) strong enough to withstand the outdoors. Does anyone know what kind of tape that might be? Is there a particular kind of tape that I can buy for this sort of thing? Maybe at an auto parts store?

Sometimes it feels like the TSA or DHS has a list entitled “Things We Want To Take Away From Passengers” and whenever something happens like what happened over Christmas, they just draw the first five options. This was one of the dangers when, after 9/11, we turned airline security over to the government. Unlike the airlines, the government has no incentive to make flying (and what happens before flying) convenient in the slightest. It’s the airlines that suffer when people decide that the if they’re going to spend four hours (including airport time) to fly 300 miles, they might as well drive six hours and pocket a few hundred dollars. At least then they don’t have to worry about what they’re going to do with their hair gel. But there’s not much the airlines can really do about it.

Sometimes, however, it works to their advantage. If they decide to further limit the amount of time that you can have personal electronics on for a plane trip, they can sell you DirecTV and other inflight entertainment options. Their incentives to treat customers well ends the moment that they can charge you a buck to treat you well.

Incidentally, that’s one of the knocks against the Kindle. Having been a frequent flier lately, I’ve found that one place I do a lot of reading is on the plain. You don’t have to worry about turning them off or on. It’s not unlike the fact that you don’t have to worry about them being charged.

I wonder if we could get Amazon to team up with Apple, Sony, Microsoft, and a bunch of other companies to try to lobby the government into getting the FAA to loosen up on the electronics ban.

My old car Rudat has, alas, gone to that great junkheap in the sky. My folks chose to scrap him rather than put the repairs in place so that it would pass safety standards. The car drove fine, for the most part, except when it would inexplicably stop. It made it 11 years and 210,000 miles, so no complaints.

When we go back to Colosse, we typically do not rent a car. This was particularly true when there were three cars hanging around. Still true with the two remaining, a Ford Mustang convertible and the Ford van.

Mom and Dad left for a cruise the day after Thanksgiving, so we had our choice of cars to take to visit her family in Beyreuth. The van has seen better days. It’s poor reliability, tape player instead of CD player, and the lack of a power plug made us decide to take the Mustang.

I had driving the Mustang around the Mayne area (the part of Colosse where I grew up) and had some real fun driving it with the top down. It was a great reminder of the fun I used to have with the old convertible when I was 17. It also made looking around easier because I had so much vision.

Without the top down, though, I can’t say that I’m a big fan of the Mustang. Most notably, convertibles have poor 360 when their tops are up. It’s also a particularly short car, though I don’t know how much of that is “Mustang” and how much “convertible”. The handling was nice in the overall.

However, what I found frustrating about the car is that it had the worst size vs interior space ratio of any car I have ever driven. There is not enough space for our suitcases in the back, the rear legroom is virtually nil. Overall, it seems less spacy than the Escorts I’m used to driving. Despite all of this, though, doesn’t have the small-car maneuverability that the Escort does. The handling was nice overall, but it was nice for a car of its size. It’s wider longer than the Escort and yet feel more cramped in every direction except width.

Maybe I need to go through a midlife crisis to appreciate sporty cars. Some day it would be cool to own a turbo engine vehicle of some sort, but if I do, I doubt I could ever get that far away from practicality. The mileage on a Mustang may be better, but I can’t imagine driving it enough for that to make a huge difference. It’s not exactly a long distance car.

I think I’m just unhip to the very fiber of my being.

AOL Auto has a list of the cars least likely to get a speeding ticket. Unsurprisingly, most of them were family cars or pick-ups. What I found interesting was that of the four that weren’t either of these things, only one was an inexpensive car, the Mazda6. The other two were pricier Buicks (Lucerne and Park Avenue) and the last was a Jaguar. For the Buicks, I guess you have a lot of older drivers (though I’ve never associated Buick with advanced age the same was as, say, Lincolns). But Jags? I thought those things were bought by people that liked to drive fast.

If you’re looking for a defender of Cash for Clunkers, you’re not going to find it with me. I’m not against it in theory if I thought that it could do what its supporters said it would do. I don’t like the idea of taking functional cars off the road and I think that the money would have been better spent elsewhere. However, there is one argument against C4C encapsulated in this article that I consider to be pretty problematic: The notion that it has made el cheap-o entry-level cars too expensive for people without much money:

The Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index reported that prices reached record highs in September. The consulting firm that publishes the index blamed low inventories.

That’s bad news in Berks, where many shoppers seek inexpensive, used vehicles, especially during difficult economic times, said George Tabakelis, general manager of Perry Auto Service & Sales on Route 61 in Perry Township.

“Customers used to be able to find a good car for their son or daughter to take to college for $2,000 or $3,000, but now that same car may cost $5,000,” Tabakelis said. “It’s sad.”

He, too, blames cash for clunkers, which has led to fewer vehicles being available at used-car auctions, and the recession.

The cars that C4C is taking off the road are those that are old and get less than 18mpg. So for people looking for cheap, entry-level, high-mileage old cars with poor mileage, their hunt got a little bit tougher and more expensive. So for bigger cars, trucks, SUVs, and low-mileage muscle cars, C4C has become tougher. However, those aren’t college student outfitters (except perhaps bigger cars). This article (as well as numerous conservative, libertarian, and anti-Obama commentators) implies that this applies to the most basic of entry-level cars. Like the old Dodge Colt or Chrysler LeBaron that I used to drive. Those aren’t being scrapped.

The LeBaron got around 25 miles to the gallon and the Colt got 30 until the day it died. The only vehicles in our family history that would be eligible would be the vans and the convertible, neither of which are “college cars” (and I have my doubts that the convertible would have been eligible because even though it got very poor mileage, I think the model itself got good mileage and I think that eligibility is determined by model and year).

The only really good argument that C4C made college cars more expensive is that by taking old SUVs and station wagons off the road, it forced people that would buy those to instead buy smaller cars, increasing demand on those cars and driving the price up. I’m not really sure how much of a factor that is, though. People that get low-mileage vehicles typically do so for a reason. When it’s necessitated by extra cargo space or passenger capacity, smaller vehicles don’t do them any good and so they’ll likely bite the bullet and get something a little more expensive. It’s a bit murkier with people that wanted a 1990 Ford Mustang or Taurus but instead must make due with an Escort. Those people may drive the price of Escorts up a little bit, but you can still get a 90’s Ford Escort for $2,500. Clint got an early-90’s Toyota Corolla for less than $1,000 and it runs great. Even if Crayola, my late-90’s Ford Escort, were running well, I wouldn’t expect more than a couple thousand for it.

For those noticing an uptick in the cost of entry-level used vehicles, it’s possible that C4C is playing a marginal role in it through a cascading effect, but to that extent so is the economy as a whole on models completely unaffected by the program. The article above actually points out that fewer new car sales are making barely-used car sales more expensive. As I’ve been car shopping for the last several months, I’ve noticed the price differential between low-usage used cars and new cars has shrunk to become pretty marginal (and I say this as someone that never intended to buy new).

Back to the original point, as much as I’d like to blame a government program that I never really liked for an undesirable turn of events, I’m afraid I just don’t buy into the notion that Cash for Clunkers, despite its various flaws, has priced people out of the entry-level cars that they need. It may have priced them out of the entry-level cars that they want, if they wanted a Ford Taurus or a truck of some sort, but for the poor cash-strapped college student depicted in the article, they have other options.

BMW’s been running a series of “if we all switched to diesel” ads lately, a bid to make their cars (in general) seem more environmentally friendly. The mileage they are advertising is actually “good but not great”, as their roadsters are advertised at 36 miles per gallon of diesel (diesel is slightly more energy-dense to start with, so there’s actually no increase in engine efficiency for the car itself, and as we’ll see below, diesel is a much less plentiful resource than gasoline). That “36 mpg” is also a highway measurement, and the real-life city measurement drops precipitously because diesel engines have a much narrower power band than gasoline engines. Diesel engines are made for “long haul, steady use” applications, such as trains, heavy truck shipping, and electric generators. They’re much more inefficient than gasoline engines when it comes to stop-and-go traffic.

The major conceit in the advertising is a ridiculously false basic premise. As I discussed somewhere a while back, the split of various products produced when you “crack” (distill/refine) a barrel of crude oil is more-or-less set. It can be massaged by maybe 2-3 percentage points through advanced distillation methods, but there’s only so much of each given type of hydrocarbon in the barrel, and you get what you get. It’s theoretically possible to convert diesel to gasoline or vice versa, but the problem is that once you start doing this, you are spending more energy than you will get back and thus, you’re just wasting fuel.

The underlying conceit of BMW’s ad – that it would be possible for every single person to switch to a diesel vehicle – falls flat. The ratio in a given barrel of gasoline to diesel/heating oil is approximately 2:1. Diesel vehicles already have to compete with demand for heating oil; that’s part of why diesel prices rise around October, when homes above the 40th parallel generally begin turning off their air conditioners and turning on their oil-based heaters for winter.

Indeed, it seems that the secondary assumption of BMW’s ads – that it would be a good idea for even a small chunk of the market in cars to switch to diesel, say 10% or so – doesn’t work out. A few years ago, the price of diesel fuel went above the price of gas, and the price of jet fuel, heating oil, and other “associated products” went up. Or rather I should say, they didn’t “go up” so much as they were available in less quantity. The factor was that ethanol replaced MTBE as the fuel stabilizer/octane-booster of choice for gasoline blends in the US, aided and abetted by some very junk science the EPA used to mandate corrosive ethanol-laced gasoline in certain major metroplex markets such as Chicago, New York, Houston, and Los Angeles. The “hidden” factor was that the gasoline blends went from using ~2% MTBE to 10% (or sometimes even sneakily greater with severe consequences) ethanol. Instantly, in other words, ~8% more “gasoline” was being produced per barrel of oil and shipped out. Faced with a relatively static demand for gasoline (the primary product from the barrel of oil), the oil refiners scaled back, and so diesel, heating oil, and everything else suddenly had an ~8% supply availability drop with a corresponding rise in price.

Now look to modern time. Decrease the demand for gasoline by 10%, and increase the demand for diesel/heating oil by a corresponding amount. How does the idea of $7/gallon diesel fuel sound to you? Essentially, a shift in demand for diesel is going to disproportionately punish diesel usage, and as was just shown above, BMW’s diesel vehicles are not any more energy-efficient (in terms of joules per mile) than their gasoline counterparts.

Of course, I’m sure BMW doesn’t care. They get an ad campaign claiming their cars are “clean” and “better for the environment”, and most of the population is too stupid to understand what’s really going on. The real fright will come if/when other car companies begin mimicing BMW, and there’s enough of a shift in usage patterns to make diesel and heating oil cost-prohibitive.

The other day I saw a billboard for 2010 models for Saturn, the soon to be defunct GM brand. I thought to myself “Who in the world would buy a Saturn now?” Saturn has always had the reputation of being a risky brand because they make their cars a little bit differently than the competition. My ex-girlfriend Julianne used to drive one. I thought that they were great right up until a driver suddenly decided to stop at a green light in some weird panic and Julie failed to break in time. That wasn’t the Saturn’s fault, but the repair bills were astonishing (and Julie was declared at-fault, and the other driver was unlicensed and uninsured anyway, so she had to foot that bill). It’s hard to imagine that the repair bills are going to get any lighter even if GM is saying that they’ll still service them. That’s the same sort of thing that makes me lukewarm on the prospect of buying an Isuzu (who recently pulled out of the US market).

Anyhow, for those of you that don’t know, Saturn was originally supposed to be bought by Roger Penske but that fell through when they couldn’t line up a manufacturer.

It’s a shame that a solid brand name and an existing distribution network is about to fall by the wayside. Presumably GM will incorporate as many as they can for their other badges, but since Saturn was a distinct enough brand that they’re going to have to worry about market cannibalism and will close more than a few. What’s interesting is that what Penske had in mind was a variation of what I was thinking that a foreign carmaker without an American presence should consider. I was thinking about it back when the dealerships were going to be cut loose and I had a slightly different idea, but it would apply doubly to Saturn and Pontiac and other to-be-discontinued brand names.

My idea was thus: An Indian or Chinese (or whatever) car company should consider buying a discontinued brand name from a US dealership. The most obvious one that came to mind was Geo, which was an import badge anyway (meaning that GM didn’t make Geos, they bought models from Suzuki and other manufacturers and rebranded them). Geos were known for being inexpensive cars, that Indian company (Tata) was known for producing inexpensive cars, so it would be a natural fit. Most people wouldn’t know that the new Geos were not the GM-branded cars of old, but it would at least be instantly recognizable. Then they could let the dealerships that were being cut loose on cannibal grounds (as opposed to profit/loss ones) in on the ground floor.

Penske had a similar idea, except with the less dusty Saturn brand. Get GM for a couple of years and then bring in foreign cars. An article in the New York Times was ambiguous as to whether or not these cars would be rebranded Saturn, though my impression is that they would have been. Saturn is certainly more expensive than buying the Geo brand would have been (if GM had been willing to sell it), but the distribution network in place was a much better idea than my hodge-podge gang of reject dealerships. Plus, Saturn is well-regarded by some while Geo is probably unknown by what would be Tata-Geo’s target demographic (young people). In any event, it looks like neither model is workable.

Of course, all of this is running around the fact that we are dealing with three automobile manufacturers that are unable to compete in the modern marketplace. It’s easier for foreign car companies to come into the US and make cars here profitably than it is for local manufacturers. The Big Three are bogged down in pension obligations and union contracts that soak up funds that could otherwise be directed towards engineering a better car. Maybe the recent re-orgs will work out, but it’s a shame that we can’t start over from scratch and deal on a level playing field with Hyundai and Honda and Toyota cars that are also built here.

And while I’m throwing my (ahem, relatively ignorant) opinions out there, I also wonder if one of the foreign companies that don’t have any existing contracts in the US couldn’t actually make a go at primarily selling through the Internet. I know that in my car search the dealership model is proving decidedly inconvenient. I’ve been contemplating the ramifications of going to a dealership and giving them a “Build a Car” from the dealer’s website, but the logistics leave a lot of room for maneuvering in the low-trust environment of auto sales (though Linus makes it sound like less of a hassle than maybe I fear). Instead, I wonder if there’s room for a business model out there where they can keep “test drive” vehicles at affiliated locations (I’m thinking used car dealerships, rental car agencies, or repair shops). Or make a deal with a rental agency and if someone wants a test drive they can rent the car at a special rate or an hourly rate or something and get a feel for it. But most selling would take place over the Internet. With their dealership agreements, it would be nearly impossible for a current automaker to sign on to such a model, but I think it’s something that one trying to break into the US market should consider.

While I’m on the subject of cars, just about every car manufacturer has an option where you can build a car online. You can’t buy it online, but you write up the specs and it gives you the MSRP and basically puts you in touch with the dealer who will then quote you a price. Have any of you actually bought a new car this way? If so, how does it work? Do you have to pay them up front or do they basically order the car and then you buy it when it arrives?

Seems like they’d want some sort of deposit or something. Ideally, I’d almost prefer it if they just had you pay for the car and then you pick it up when it arrives. But every conceivable way of handing the transaction seems fraught with peril. If you put down a deposit or buy the car at the outset, they have all the leverage when it arrives because they have your money. Not that you wouldn’t have any recourse if they suddenly remembered that there were some special fees that they didn’t mention earlier, but it would it would probably be worth your while to pay a non-trivial sum just to get the dang car you’ve been waiting for. On the other hand, even if there is no deposit and they just order the car for you to purchase later, there’s nothing to stop them from suddenly raising the price or wanting to renegotiate once the car is there. You’d been salivating over this car for 6-8 weeks, after all. What are you going to do, start all over?

So… anybody know how that works? What sorts of protections you have that the price you agreed on is the price that you pay and the car you ordered is the car that you get?

The Big Money’s Matthew DeBord wonders what happened to the family car:

To put it bluntly, even big sedans aren’t big enough to haul around the bevy of sports gear, pets, and offspring that now make up many American families. In the 1990s, families began replacing their Buicks and Ford Tauruses with SUVs, and now they’ve moved on to a combination of SUVs and so-called “crossover” vehicles, which are essentially five- and seven-passenger SUVs built not on truck, but on car platforms, for better handling and fuel-efficiency. They’re the modern-day station wagons.

The family sedan, meanwhile, has gone the way of the Dodo. But sedans are still in play. One of Ford’s most popular vehicles—one that sold like gangbusters during Cash for Clunkers—is the Focus. It’s a small sedan, however. So what does Ford do when it’s time to move that customer up to a larger car? {…}

Slip into a Ford Taurus today, however, and you can see my dad’s era rapidly receding. What you get instead is the latest iteration of the BMW experience. When BMW began bringing its “sport” sedans to the U.S. in the 1970s and ’80s, buyers immediately noticed that they were both more compact than American family sedans, and also more organized around the driving experience. (They were, after all “the ultimate driving machine.”) You sat in a snug cockpit, bolstered into your seat, with instruments arrayed around you as if you’d been dropped into a fighter plane.

Well, obviously, a Ford driver that wants to move into a large car gets either the mid-size Fusion or full-size Taurus. The problem for Ford is that neither of these cars stack up particularly well against their foreign counterparts, the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord. Both of those cars, last I checked, were selling pretty well. And both are pretty big sedans and getting bigger with each remodel. So part of the problem is that sedans are something that Ford (and its American rivals) simply have not been doing a very good job of engineering, producing, and marketing their larger vehicles in comparison with its Japanese rivals.

DeBord comments that bringing back the Taurus name, but the real question is why they ever got rid of it. Ford fans were really displeased with that development and the answer to that question is a monumentally stupid one. Basically, they wanted all of their cars to start with the letter “F” the same way that their SUV series starts with the letter “E” (Explorer, Escape, Expedition, Edge, etc). So they dropped the Escort and the Taurus and replaced them with the Focus, the Fusion, and the Five Hundred. The Fusion was technically the replacement for the Taurus, though the Five Hundred was considered to be. Interestingly, now that the Taurus is coming back, it’s coming back as a full-size rather than mid-size Sedan. The Honda Accord made the leap last year. The Camry did a number of years back. I find this interesting because, despite what DeBord says, the auto-makers are making their marquee cars larger rather than smaller.

That’s not to say DeBord is wrong. In fact, I think it goes to show that he’s right. People are looking for more space. The engineers are doing a good job of cramming more space into a smaller-seeming car. My wife’s Camry has an astonishing amount of cargo space and until 2005 the full-size Toyota Avalon was not much larger. I used to drive a 1976 Chevy Caprice that I called The Trawler because it was like a boat on wheels. That’s what a full-size car used to be like and it’s no surprise that once other high-storage, roomy vehicles became available, that the full-size boat-car market cratered. If you’re going to drive something that large, why not drive a truck? The BMW model that DeBord cites sort of changed that as car designers have sought to make larger cars easier to handle (and not quite so large). There’s recently been a similar move on the compact and subcompact front, with cars like the Nissan Versa being both small and boasting some serious interior space. In other words, models are moving towards making smaller cars seem larger from the inside with more space for what matters (people and cargo).

But ultimately, I think that people like me are who DeBord is looking at when he says that people are less interested in full-size (or even mid-size) sedans. I look at a lot of those cars and I wonder “What’s really the point?” Clancy wants to replace her current Camry with another Camry and there’s no really good reason not to accommodate that unless we determine that we need all-wheel drive. But the cost of a Camry is not all that much less than that of a light-SUV (and the cost of an Avalon is more). There’s no AWD option (except on the super-expensive hybrid). No roof-rack. Lower safety scores. And yet it costs about the same as a Mitsubishi Outlander and only a couple thousand less than a Toyota RAV or Honda CR-V. The Camry in particular (in opposition to the Taurus and other full-size sedans) does boast phenomenal reliability ratings (one of the reasons that Clancy wants another Camry is that her mid-90’s model is running like a sprinting ninja), but the Accord’s ratings are similar to the Outlander’s (though the Accord’s safety ratings are comparable to the Outlander’s and better than the Camry’s).

I don’t have time to go through every model and do a comparison, and I know at least some mid-size and full-size sedans (Subaru Impreza, Mercury Milan) do offer AWD, though I should note that they only do so at the highest trims. The SUVs, except Subarus, will charge you more, but they won’t reserve AWD for the trims where you also have to get Bluetooth and GPS standard.

Ultimately, of course, it comes down to personal preference. Clancy doesn’t understand how a big guy like me can prefer tiny little cars over full-size sedans (or crossover SUVs), but for the me answer is improved mileage (though that’s less of an issue when I’m not commuting 60-110 miles a day) and mostly improved maneuverability. When I drive the Camry, I feel like “Gosh, I might as well be driving a low-riding SUV.” But obviously cars like the Camry do have something going for them because they remain prevalent. That’s changing somewhat, though I really don’t expect the larger family cars to go anywhere. They’re no longer really good family cars, though they’re still fine for secondary family vehicles that want two cars that can fit in car seats and the like. And as childless people that move around a lot, the Camry has proven to be much more helpful than the Escort has been or its successor the Focus would be.