Car Buying Tips

I just bought a new car this weekend and wanted to share some tips:
1. Go to Edmunds.com to price your dream vehicle.
2. Get a small notebook (a physical paper-thingy, oddly enough, they still make them) and keep all your notes in one place. Staple business cards into the notebook. I had scraps of paper everywhere and it was a mess.
3. When you first visit a dealership, ask for someone from the internet department - they can get you the best deals. Better yet, phone ahead and make an appointment.
4. When you've got your car model, trim number, and options set, use Edmunds.com to send an email to all the dealers near you asking for a quote on a car. Ask for the Vin# of the auto. I had a car swapped out from under a deal at a dealership. It was suppose to have a certain option for the price, but oddly enough didn't.
5. Ask for the car price and the final "drive-out" price.
6. After getting the best deal, email all the losers and ask if they can meet the price.
7. After getting the best price, take a copy of the email with you to the dealership, just in case, like in my situation, the dealership forgot the low price quoted.

Why the CAFE Fuel Standards Don't Matter Anymore

The US government passed the "Energy Policy Conservation Act" in 1975 which mandated a Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) for all a car makers products. The intent was to raise the fuel efficiency of cars.
Many electrons have been spilled in the blogosphere about how to reduce our dependency on foreign oil. The Republicans typically say, "Let's drill off-shore and in that big cold state up North." The Democrats say, "Let's just raise the CAFE standards." The current energy bill proposes a target of 35 mpg by 2020.
Well, the CAFE standards don't matter anymore. Here's two reasons why:
1. With gasoline at $4.00 a gallon, SUV sales are tanking already - down 50% this year. It doesn't matter what the CAFE standards are, people are buying more fuel efficient cars. In the last year the fuel efficiency of US cars has gone from 20.2 mpg to 24.4 mpg.
2. The plugin electric cars are coming. By 2020 the concept of miles per gallon will be moot. We will have gone electric. The pace of battery technology is accelerating and will provide a huge economic advantage to electrical cars. With new Lithium-Ion batteries and EEStor's super-capacitor, the trend will be towards electric cars. Chevy's over-hyped Volt and the Japanese plugins will get here in 2010. They will probably have the bugs worked out of them and be practical by 2015. By 2020 most passenger cars will be electric, trucks may take another decade.
So congress should quit wasting time about whether the CAFE standards should be 35 or 37 mpg in 2020, it won't matter.
What's the mpg of an all electric plugin car anyway?

Why Oil will be $30 a barrel in 30 years

Ok, Ok, I know you don't believe me and it's heresy to say such things, but please read on.



In the US we use two-thirds of our 21 million barrels of oil a day for transportation.
If you believe the CIA factbook we import 58 percent of our oil. Let's see, if we do the math, that's 66 percent imported - 58 percent used in transportation, uhm, that gives us 6 percent left over.
The US would be self-sufficient in oil if we replaced the energy in our transportation sector with something else. If the US were self-sufficient in oil production, the price of world crude would collapse.

Any of the following, or more likely combinations of these, will make this happen:

1. Electric Cars. Electricity is much cheaper than gasoline to power cars. Electricity can be produced domestically in the US from solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, wave, coal, or nuclear. The problem with electric cars is the battery. Batteries today are too expensive, too heavy, and have too short of a life span. That is changing. If any of many competing successors to our current battery technology pan out, the electric car will replace a majority, but not all, of our petroleum-based vehicles. Things like supercapacitors from technology by MIT, GT, RPI, EEStor, or EPod, could easily make the electric car viable. Incremental improvements to our lead or Lithium batteries may work.


2. Shale Oil. Colorado has three times the energy of Saudi Arabia, but it's locked up in rock. Shell oil thinks it has a way to produce the oil for $30 a barrel.


3. Coal. Coal can be converted into liquid fuels for about $35 dollars a barrel. Germany, Japan, and South Africa have all done this. These technologies have not been pursued in the past because oil was so cheap. Who wants to invest billions in a refinery to make $35 oil when it may drop to $20?.

Many other technologies like cellulosic ethanol, biodiesel, methane hydrates may also work.

If OPEC will just keep prices high for the next decade, people will invest in these alternate technologies and eventually the price of crude oil will collapse.
Despite what all the "peak oil" supporters claim, these alternate technologies will force the cost of oil to be only $30 a barrel in 30 years.