Drew Dowdell

Feel so sick and gross today. I got my second dose of the covid vaccine last night and it's hitting me bad.

Depends on which price point you're shopping. If your X3 xDrive lease is almost up and you can get get over the interior, a Tesla is a viable option. X3 xDrive30 - $43,000 / GLC 4Matic - $45,200 / Model-Y - $46,690 after tax credits and gas savings.* *and yes, before @balthazar attacks that point, calculating fuel spend is a valid part of the equation. At 25 mpg combined both of the germans are going to cost $1,400 a year to fuel while the Tesla will be a tiny fraction of that.

I can't get 110 Octane race gas conveniently near me. I can get E85 at a 50c+ discount on 87. ($2.15 v. $2.65 locally). I get miserable MPGs no matter what I put into it because max speed on my ~8.5 mile 45 minute commute is about 45mph. So, do I get 13mpg or 9.5 MPG....? it doesn't really matter. At least the truck feels a bit more spritely when I put the E-85. I did the spreadsheet when I first bought it and I figured out that as long as I have about a 40c/gallons savings, the reduced fuel economy is a wash.

Not every metric. They aren't anywhere near as efficient. That matters to some people. And lets take your argument upscale. By every one of my metrics, except efficiency, there are rows and rows of cars that I would buy before I bought a Tesla.... doesn't matter the model, pick one and its direct competition in price is going to have a better interior and better build quality. Lets take the high end Model-X, I think the only gas powered vehicle at that price that has a worse interior is the Maserati Levante. Go to any "Premier Automotive Group" dealership that has all the lux brands, close your eyes, spin and point, and you'll end up with a better vehicle than the Model X by every possible measure except efficiency. However, Tesla keeps beating those other brands in sales in those market segments.... and not by a little, but by a lot. I'm too sick to go look up the stats, but the Model-3 is outselling 3-series, C-class, and A4 combined some months. The EV is going to take the same trajectory as the Smart Phone in adoption. First its going to be an expensive toy for rich people (iPhone, BlackBerry), one brand will dominate as "best" (Apple), and eventually other brands will come in and tackle the lower end markets (Samsung, LG). A few upstarts will show up (OnePlus) that make a lot of noise and then fade away, and the Old Guard (Motorola, Nokia) will try to have a go at it. The adoption curve will take longer, but it will be almost exactly the same shape. And in both cases, @ocnblu will be sitting there in a gas powered something with a flip phone.

He wouldn't recharge it at all. I'd plug it in for him on Sundays and he'd be set for a week. And Apples to Oranges is exactly my point. Everybody's best is different. I don't mind buying low-mileage used but there are some people who never buy used for whatever reason they have. There are people who value efficiency over performance... they're never going to buy a $35k Camaro. There are people who value performance over space, they're never going to buy a Pacifica Hybrid. Part of the problem the industry has today is that the automotive media has told everyone that the "best" is a German or Japanese crossover and if you can't afford that, Domestic will do.

"Better" is subjective. My "best" will be different than your "best" will be different than Albert's "best". My $36k went to a 7 year old Avalanche with 12,800 miles on it. If I had another $36k to spend it would be on a 2019 CT6. Albert would be fine with a Bolt at that price because he'd never have to fuel it and it has CarPlay and heated seats... the only features he cares about and they lease cheap. The killer for us was the lack of AWD, but Bolts come pretty nicely equipped even at base prices. Edit: Just priced one out on Chevy's website and they have $7,000 cash back + 0% for 84 months for financing and $6,750 cashback for leases. So now you need to compare it to $29k cars instead. Plus I still think it qualifies for the tax credit, but I'm not sure. Damn... now you've got me thinking of one as a commuter scooter....

Again, short drives are mandated by short ranges. People probably couldn't drive more even if they wanted to. Long range EVs change the equation. My drives, on average, these past 12 months are probably less than 30 miles a day (and falling as I start to work from home more again). But I still would not want an EV that didn't have a ~300 mile range or better because I do like to take road trips. I couldn't do that in a Leaf, but I could in a Rivian. Both Albert and I could drive Volts to work and never use gas. I didn't say it was. I said the average is much higher than you seem to be implying. Average transaction price is already higher than the base price of a Bolt.

Yeah. It gets 320hp on regular gas, 328hp on E85

Motor1's clickbait headline aside... no the Tundra will not be a world beater no matter how good it is. No it won't take over Ford, GM, and Ram. Toyota simply doesn't have the manufacturing capacity to do so. They'll remain the distance 5 place brand. They can make 100,000 Tundras a year... that's all the the plant can handle. Ford can build over 900,000 F-150s.

Horrible selection bias, that study shows nothing of value. 2014 - 2017 the only BEVs available were Teslas, a few Bolts, the Nissan Leaf, the very and a few compliance cars with too short ranges. I don't think anyone here needs a study to know that if you buy a vehicle with a 100 mile range, you're not going to be driving it as far as a gasoline vehicle or your lifestyle even with a gasoline vehicle doesn't involve driving long distances. It's a fairly big "duh!" The Bolt wasn't even available nationwide until August of 2017. Originally it was only sold in Metro areas of California and Oregon. These days we have a number of longer range EVs with a whole bunch more hitting the market in the next 24 months. Show me a 2021 - 2025 study and get back to me. So you can round file that study.

There's a reason that GM and Ford no longer make vehicles that cheap anymore... they don't make money doing it. Taking away the Spark which no one buys anyway, the cheapest vehicle at GM right now is the $19,995 Trailblazer which you and I both know is unobtainium at that price and most of them are sold as LT AWDs with an MSRP of $26,695. The best selling GM that isn't a truck are the Equinox/Terrain twins. Average MSRP of $30k for those. The days of the $14k Sonic LT 5-door are over. As of this time last year, the average new car price was $37,867 and with production shortages, that price had to have climbed. The Industry average is right above the Bolt EV's base price.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. At my old job we put in loads of load monitors in manufacturing plants. In one plant they had a number of those cyclone dust collector things. We put a load meter on each one. We were able to tell the plant owner that one of their cyclones was on its way to failure because it was using 4 times the electricity of the rest of them. Not only did it save the plant owner from an unplanned outage, it reduced the electricity usage of the cyclones dramatically. That is an outlier of an example, but we were able to provide recommendations to plant owners to adjust shifts to save money among other insights.

You don't know what Managed Demand is, do you?

The Alpha platform is superbly weighted and balanced, one of the absolute best balanced platforms in the industry. The FWD based CLA does not have that. The Alpha platform does everything that the enthusiast crowd loved about BMWs from 2003 before BMWs got heavy and lost their steering feel. But Pole movers like SMK pulled up the goal and decided that flabby 3-series were the new ideal.

Not for a Serp belt on a BMW X1 it's not. It's just a FWD 2.0 liter 4-cylinder. If it's taking you 2 hours of labor to install the Serp belt on such an engine (not timing or anything like that) just a regular old Serp belt... then it's a bad design. Even on the old GM B-bodies equipped with the towing package, it required removing the first belt, removing the mechanical fan mount, and then removing the second belt, I can do that in under an hour. If it takes more than one wrench to replace the belt, it was designed badly. I can do all 4 V-belts on my Olds with a single adjustable wrench.

They actually make special Serp belt wrenches. $15 at Harbor Freight and they work great so you don't need baby hands.

You don't notice it until it's gone.... I'm talking about the 8 horsepower I gain for running E-85. By all accounts I should never notice that difference in power or the few lb-ft I also get. But I use E-85 almost exclusively. This past week however, I had a big build up of fuel points from my local grocery chain and they don't offer E-85, so I just filled up with regular and got my $1.00 a gallon off. What I'm noticing is that while 0-60 is still irrelevant as before, the truck feels less lively and even a bit sluggish off the line. I got another coupon for $10 off a $20 fill-up, but also that station doesn't have E-85... so I'll just live with it for now.

Why is any serp belt replacement EVER $541?? If it takes you more than 20 minutes to replace the belt, it is a bad design.

I borrow my best friend's dog pretty often, but I might get a photocopy sometime in the summer. Waiting for his Pup Cup at Starbucks...

Gosh how could I have missed him!? I did meet @A Horse With No Name also many years ago

I'd be happy to buy you a coffee! And I forgot @Z-06 / Michael. I used to stay with him and his wife for Detroit Auto shows in the early days.

Oh! I know who I missed! @GMTruckGuy74 That's a great idea! Would others be interested in this?

I love those seats! The Recaros that came on the second gen CTS were sublime! All they have to do is match that and they're perfect.

@balthazar @Cory Wolfe @Chris_Doane @ocnblu @Flybrian @Camino LS6 @caddycruiser @knightfan26917 @HoLottaBuicks @William Maley I feel like I'm forgetting someone from the meetup at Camino's way back when.

She drove one of those 4WD Nissan Sentra Wagon things