Cars. We have to buy one. Personally I have a short shopping list, manual gears, hatchback, low environmental impact, not a horrible colour.Fortunately, Kevin, whose initial list is the same as mine, has done a lot of research and has both expanded and then honed those needs into something realistic. We're looking seriously at the Honda Fit, this is sold in Britain as the Honda Jazz.
And whilst I was still living in Europe, I would never, ever have even dreamed of looking at a Japanese car.
The Honda Fit makes it into the Californian category for low emission cars, here, for some reason, the manual transmission model just misses the band that attracts a $1,000 government subsidy for low emission cars by a pip because of the safety features, so Honda gives the subsidy itself.
At some point, we'll test drive one.
For the moment we have a rented Kia something-or-other. Nice car, a little bigger than I'm used to, although still termed 'compact' here. But it has automatic transmission, and boy oh boy do I loathe and despise automatic transmission. I hate not driving the car, but rather having to restrain it. I hate not being able to change gear when I want to. I hate the whoosh, whoosh of the engine as it decides for itself. I hate the lack of smoothness that you can only achieve with manual gears. And I hate the feeling of just 'operating machinery' rather than driving a car.
But...it's a car, and it's free for a few days, so I shouldn't be looking a gift horse usw. Or maybe I should be thinking, oh yes I should, there's no reason why I am no longer able to still drive our own car, it has been taken away from us by some guy's bad driving.
There is a time and a place.
At the Park at the moment, we have a steady stream of further ed students from a programme at a local college.
Yesterday, I took a group of ten five year olds up to the pond platform to discover two of the college students there smoking pot.
I asked them to move on and tried to play it down, but several of the parents noticed. I e-mailed the college tutor but have had no response.
And yesterday MY Alex moved into her new flat in London. I hope it all went well.
3 comments:
Has Kev checked out the Prius?
The Prius is on the larger end of anything we've looked at. The great fuel economy comes at some initial cost (it's about 5-6k more than the Fit). There is also the issue of batteries. There are a lot of them and they eventually have to be disposed. Where exactly do you put 300 pounds of lead/acid batteries? Not to mention that in building the Prius, materials and parts are mined and assembled all over the world.
I also just discovered, the only transmission is continuously variable. No manual.
It's a great experiment, and will lead to good things for the industry. But, it's not there yet. It really only makes sense for heavy use vehicles where you really get the impact of the fuel economy.
What I'd love to see up here is a PZEV (partial zero emission vehicle). Sadly, these are currently only available as an option in California and more recently a few other states.
Thanks for that!
Even Jeremy Clarkson had issues with the disposal of the batteries and he really couldn't give a shit about the planet.
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