Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #1661: When you can’t see the traffic light ahead of you. Part 1, the setup.

 

Briefly:

  1.  I frequently have a hard time seeing stop lights, if I’m first in line, due to the steeply sloped windshield of the Prius Prime.
  2. This is, apparently, a fairly common problem on modern cars.  Good aerodynamics require a sleek, low-profile shape.
  3. The common solution is to crane your neck as required, and get on with life.
  4. There are devices that address this problem, but I find them lacking.  They are either antique designs, finicky, provide barely-usable images, permanently intrude on field of vision, or all of the above.
  5. I’ve come up with my own solution, but I’m waiting for the parts from Amazon.  I’m going to try a visor-mounted flip-down cheap Fresnel lens.  Total cost, including zip ties to attach it, about $3.  Alternatively, I’ll need to buy a “wide angle Fresnel lens”, which will likely cost around $10, but will give me an upright image.
  6. I believe there’s so little potential profit in this that I’m putting the design in the public domain.

Continue reading Post #1661: When you can’t see the traffic light ahead of you. Part 1, the setup.

Post #1658: Testing eyeglasses and sunglasses for UV protection. Part 2, the initial tests

Recall the goal of this:  I want to see how well my eyeglasses, sunglasses, and car windows block ultraviolet (UV) light.  See my recent Post #1654 on this topic if you wonder why anyone would care about that. Continue reading Post #1658: Testing eyeglasses and sunglasses for UV protection. Part 2, the initial tests

Post #1657: The World Turned Upside-Down, Part 2

 

Background:  <=24¢/KWH

Yesterday I calculated the cost of running a Prius Prime on electricity versus gasoline.  At the current U.S. average of $3.24 for a gallon of gas, electricity is the cheaper fuel for a Prius Prime if and only if it costs 24 cents per kilowatt-hour or less.

That calculation was prompted by the claim that in much of New England, it’s now cheaper to run a Prime on gas, rather than electricity.  As it turns out, that’s true.  As of September 2022, most of New England faced electricity prices that exceeded that threshold.  (As did the average price in California.)  I’m guessing that New England rates have gone up further since September, owing to a recent spike in the price of natural gas.

Source:  US EIA.

In a previous rant (Post #1548), I had already noted how expensive public charging stations were.  Not only did I find the one I tried to use to be both baffling and unreliable, you can pay anywhere from $0.50 to $1.25 per KWH for the privilege of using one.  Even last summer, when gas was expensive, it was cheaper to buy gas for the Prius Prime than to charge the battery at the commercial charging station I visited.

I’ll note in passing that there didn’t seem to be anything unique about the Prius Prime in this gas-versus-electricity calculation. I did the same calculation for a PHEV Volvo getting gas mileage about half that of the Prius, and came out with just about the same break-even price for electricity compared to gasoline.  The Volvo simply uses more of either gas or electricity per mile.

The upshot is that, at current gas and electric prices, some fairly large segments of the public will not see fuel cost savings from electric transport.  At the moment, that’s pretty much the entire population of New England and California.  (Though I did not factor in generally higher gas prices in California.)  And, likely indefinitely, that includes people who can’t charge at home and so must use a commercial charging station.

How large?  California and New England together account for about 14% of the U.S. population.  More importantly, near as I can tell, about a third of U.S. residents live in something other than owner-occupied or single-family housing.  Assuming those folks typically have no option other than commercial charging stations, that means at current gas and electric rates, something close to half of Americans will see electricity as a more expensive motor fuel than gasoline. 

I’m a big believer in electric transport.  But I wasn’t quite fully aware of the large fraction of the population for which there are no fuel cost savings in switching to electricity.  Sure, eventually apartment buildings might all come with chargers.  And sure, gas and electricity prices will vary over time.  But right here, right now, electricity is the cheaper motor fuel for only about half the population.

Tesla?  No thanks.

Which got me to thinking about a name that’s been in the news these days:  Tesla.

When we were shopping for our last car, and eventually settled on the Prius Prime, we considered going fully electric.  But I can’t recall giving even a moment’s thought to getting a Tesla.  And offhand, I couldn’t quite remember why.

So I took a look.

Oh, yeah, it’s because I’m cheap.  And because we buy our cars purely to be practical transport.

In any case, here’s the head-to-head comparison between the Prius Prime and the cheapest Tesla, the Model 3 rear-wheel-drive, courtesy of fueleconomy.gov

To boil it down, the cars are equally efficient as electric vehicles, and are the same size (same total interior volume).  But the Tesla costs almost $20K more, and has less than half the range.

The Tesla is faster, for sure.  But in Northern Virginia traffic, that’s more-or-less completely irrelevant.  My zero-to-sixty time isn’t set by my car, it’s set by whatever pace the inevitable traffic dictates.

I’m sure there are some bells and whistles on the Tesla that you don’t get on a Prius Prime. But, to tell you the truth, I don’t much like the ones we got on the Prius.  The very first thing I switched off, from the factory settings, was the automatic-steering function in cruise control.  I guess if I’m driving my car, I want to be driving my car.  Not having the car second-guessing where I want to be on the roadway.

And, to be fair, the Prius lacks snob appeal. It’s a pedestrian workaday vehicle, suitable for middle-class people who have some sense of concern for the environment.  It’s also exceptionally cheap in terms of lifetime cost-of-ownership.  Or so said Consumer Reports, at some point.

But with a Tesla, you can user their network of superchargers.  And if you have to pay for that, you’ll pay an average of $0.28 per KWH.  (That, per a 2021 article in Motorbiscuit.)  And, duly noted, $0.28 > $0.24.  So even with that dedicated network of branded charging stations, at today’s prices, you’ll pay more to fuel your car with electricity than with gasoline.

But the environment …

In America, we burn an average of 600 gallons of gasoline, annually, per licensed driver.  (Calculated from this reference and this reference).  Driving a Prius Prime, I’m guessing that my wife and I are down to maybe 25 gallons each, per year.  (I have to guess, because we go so long between tanks that neither of us could remember when we last bought gasoline.)  That’s the result of driving mostly on electricity, and otherwise driving an extremely efficient hybrid.

In theory, sure, we could reduce that 25 gallons down to zero by going fully electric.  But, honestly, in the context of my fellow Americans, I can only feel but so bad about the 25 gallons.  And that annual quarter-ton of C02 emissions from driving is probably not the worst environmental sin I commit.

But, as importantly, right now, one of the biggest constraints to electrifying the U.S. fleet is the lack of battery manufacturing capacity.  All the majors are now going full-out to build more battery factories.  There just are not enough traction batteries available to electrify the entire U.S. fleet, and there won’t be for years to come.

So the other way to think of the Prius Prime is that it makes efficient use of a scarce resource:  EV batteries.  The same amount of batteries that will build one EV Tesla Model 3 will build about eight PHEV Prius Primes.  Those eight Primes, displacing standard gas cars, will have a far larger environmental benefit than that single Tesla.

Moreover, that big battery, in the Tesla, is mostly wasted, in the sense that the driver will rarely use the entire capacity of the battery.  By contrast, the PHEV Prius Prime has a much smaller battery, that is fully discharged far more frequently.

From that standpoint, EVs are … wasteful.  As long as lack of battery capacity is a hard constraint on electrifying U.S. transport, we’d get a lot more environmental bang-for-the-buck out of PHEVs than EVs.  For the simple reason that a PHEV has a small battery, and uses it hard.  While an EV has a big battery that is hardly used.

Bottom line:  I just don’t see the fundamental value proposition in a Tesla.  Which means, to me, that people by-and-large were not choosing it based on a simple dollars-and-cents calculation.  And if image was a big factor in the choice, well, based on what I’ve been reading in the newspapers of late, Tesla may face some challenges moving forward.

Post #1656: The World Turned Upside-Down

 

Today my wife came across a thread on PriusChat in which a New Englander claimed that it now cost more to run his Prius Prime on electricity than on gasoline.

After I got done scoffing, I decided to look up the data.  Actually check the facts.  Just as a last resort.

And, in fact, that’s plausible.  With the recent declines in the price of gasoline, and sharp spikes in electricity prices in New England, it’s entirely possible that running a Prius Prime on gas is now cheaper than running it on electricity in that area.

Let me just chuck out a few numbers here, all based on the current EPA ratings of 4 miles per KWH and 54 miles per gallon for a Prius Prime.

First, it’s just math to figure out the break-even price of electricity, for any given cost of gasoline.  That is, the price at which it would cost you the same to power the car with electricity as with gasoline.  Because a gallon gets you 54 miles, and a KWH gets you 4 miles (per the U.S. EPA), just multiply the price of gas by (4/54 =~) 0.074.  So running the Prius Prime on $4/gallon gas costs the same as running it on electricity costing ($4 x 0.074  =) 30 cents per KWH.

Like so.  The “break-even” price of electricity just shadows the actual price of gas:

Source:  Gas price data from the St. Louis Fed FRED system.

Historically, at least in my area, that gasoline-equivalent cost was well above the actual price of electricity.  Hence, the fuel cost for electric-powered miles was well below the cost for gas-powered miles.

But now?  In, say, Boston?  Not so.  Take the red line off the prior graph — that’s your gasoline-break-even cost of electricity — and compare it to the actual cost of electricity in Boston and in the Washington DC area.

Source:  Electric rates via the St. Louis FRED system, e.g., DC electric rates.

And, sure enough, of late, the precipitous drop in gasoline prices, combined with the spike in New England electricity rates, has made it noticeably more expensive to run a Prius Prime on electricity, than on gasoline, in that area.  Although, as you can see from the very bottom line, it’s still cheaper to fill up on electricity than gasoline in the DC area.

Discussion

Apparently the spike in New England electric rates is due to a spike in U.S. natural gas prices, which, in turn, seems to be blamed on the war in Ukraine and the resulting spike in European gas prices.  The general idea being that the New England area is heavily dependent on natural gas for electricity production.

Either way, prices in the natural gas market now seem to be easing.

On the one hand, this raises an interesting advantage of having a true dual-fuel vehicle like the Prius Prime.  Within the limits of your battery capacity, your fuel cost can always be the lesser of the gas or electric per-mile rate.  You are protected from price spikes in either the gas or electric markets.

The question is, is the Prius Prime something of a special case, owing to its overall high efficiency? Or, does this have any strong implications for the per-mile cost advantages of electric vehicles in general?  I think the answer is, I think, the latter.

So, let me do the same calculation on a more typical U.S. vehicle.  Offhand, let me choose a PHEV Volvo, getting a pitiful 2 miles per KWH or equally pitiful 26 miles per gallon of gas.

Source:  2022 Volvo from Fueleconomy.gov

But the key here is “equally pitiful”.  The conversion factor from gas price per gallon, to the equivalent cost in electricity, is calculated just as it was for the Prius.  In this case, with 26 MPG and 2 miles per KWH, the conversion is (2 /26 = ) 0.077, virtually identical to what it was for the Prius.  And that’s because the Volvo uses just about twice as much gas, and twice as much electricity, as the Prius does.

Equally pitiful mileage on either gas or electric.  Which means that, as with Prius Prime drivers in New England, Volvo drivers in New England will also now find it cheaper to run on gas instead of electricity.  Sure, they’re paying twice as much per mile as Prius Prime drivers.  But that’s true whether they are burning gas or electricity.

I should probably do another one or two, to make sure that wasn’t an accidental cherry-pick.  But I’m guessing that what that sharp-eyed New Englander calculated for his Prius Prime applies to much of the dual-fuel gas-electric fleet.  With gas as cheap as it is now, there are spots in the U.S. where the fuel cost of gas is lower than the fuel cost of electricity.

In prior posts, I already showed that recharging your car at typical commercial-charger rates already costs more than running it on gasoline.  So if you don’t have a home-recharge option, or can’t recharge for free, there are no fuel savings from converting to electricity.  This means a significant fraction of the U.S. market may have little financial incentive to go electric.  This latest analysis just shows that unless those electrical rates come down, entire geographic areas of the U.S. will be in the same fossil-fuel-powered boat.

Post #1654: Testing eyeglasses and sunglasses for UV protection. Part 1, the set-up.

I’d like to know the level of protection from ultraviolet rays that my current eyeglasses and sunglasses provide.  In this post, I don’t actually do the test, but I set up all the background information.  The test has to wait for materials to arrive from Amazon. Continue reading Post #1654: Testing eyeglasses and sunglasses for UV protection. Part 1, the set-up.

Post #1653: The life table as the cure for lucralgia.

 

As we approach the end of the year, I think about my final charitable donations for the year.

“Give all you have to the poor, and follow me.”  You can find that said, as the supposed words of Jesus,  in one form or the other, in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

In fact, in the most radical interpretation of those various passages, one cannot follow Jesus unless one does that.  “Easier for the camel to pass through the eye of the needle, than for a rich man to enter heaven”.  And all that.

How nutso is that? 

I mean, just work out the literal implications of that for the modern U.S. suburbanite.

“Honey, I’m selling the house, the cars; liquidating the IRAs and the investment accounts; and giving all the proceeds to the church.  We and our children can live as beggars.  But it’s OK, we’ll get our reward in heaven.”

One might plausibly expect some negative feedback to that plan.  As in, I’d expect to be declared mentally incompetent if I tried to do that.  That’s how contrary to any sense of self-preservation or self-interest that particular piece of New Testament wisdom runs.  If you actually tried it, the courts would stop you, one way or the other.  For your own good.  Because no rational individual would do that.  They would assume you were nuts.

But is that necessarily true?

Lucralgia

When I was a much younger man, I made up the term “lucralgia” to describe something I felt from time to time.  It’s a portmanteau of lucre (money), and -algia (pain).

It’s that special pain you feel when giving away a significant sum of money.  It’s the “hurts” in “give ’til it hurts”.  I suspect that each person’s sense of lucralgia sets an upper limit on their charity, barring those who literally follow the rules of their church (e.g., literal tithing).  You can only stand to give but so much.

I’ve always felt inadequate, somehow, in my philanthropy.  You’re supposed to feel cheerful and upbeat about all the good your doing by contributing to worthy charities.  All those babies saved, trees hugged, and whatnot.

But all I ever felt was a vague sense of duty.  And lucralgia.  That ache behind your solar plexus when you do your duty and sign a bunch of checks to worthy charities.

No joy.

The life table.

Those of us in the business know it.  Actuaries.  Health economists.

For the rest of you, find your line.  Then read ’em and weep.  This is an excerpt from the 2020 U.S life table, showing how likely it is that, all other things equal, 100,000 Americans will live past a certain age.

Source:  CDC

The life table as the cure for lucralgia, or the rewards for a lifetime of hard work.

Here in the U.S.A., if you work hard, succeed financially, invest with wisdom, and live modestly, and generally are lucky enough to have all suns shine, you will eventually be rewarded with the epiphany that you will die before you can spend all of your money.

I am one of the fortunate ones who has met the criteria.

Perhaps less fortunately, I figured this out, for myself, a few years back.  Maybe  it’s because I am a health economist, working mainly with Medicare data.  But I was completely familiar with the life table.  And when I slapped that up against an estimate of expected financial returns — that’s when I retired.

The truly weird thing about that is that once you reach that realization, then, rationally, as long as you place little or no value on passing your money on to your kids, then the value of money is zero.

If the checking account balance is going to be massively positive on date-of-death, then, what’s the value of another $1000 more or less?  It’s zero. 

You can’t take it with you.

An aside for my favorite economist-religous joke.

Old Mr. McGill is getting on in years.  He’s exceptionally well-to-do, but never married and has no close relatives.  All throughout his life, he’s donated millions to the Church.  But all he has now, in life, is his fortune.

So he asks the parish priest if he can take his fortune with him when he dies.  And he gets the stock answer, no, you can’t take it with you.

Not satisfied, he kicks it up the Church hierarchy, based on his history of massive charity toward the Church.  At some point, the Pope Himself communes with God.  And, lo and behold, in this one case, God will make an exception.  The decision comes down.  Mr. McGill can take it with him.

Overjoyed, Mr. McGill starts liquidating his assets, converting everything to gold bars and stacking them in a big aluminum suitcase.  Block upon block of the precious metal.  And, as is so often the case, as he almost got that suitcase filled, he suffered a massive stroke and died.

And there he went, suitcase in hand, off to heaven.

St. Peter met him at the gate, took one look at Mr. McGill and his suitcase, and said, “Nope, you know the rules.  You can’t take it with you.”

To which Mr. McGill replied, “There’s an exception in my case”.

St. Peter promptly conferred with God, found out that this was true, opened up the Pearly Gates, and waved Mr. McGill into heaven.

“But,”, said St. Peter, “I have to know.   What was so important that you couldn’t leave it back on Earth, but had to drag it with you to Heaven?”

And McGill gets a big smile on his face, places his suitcase down, and opens it up to display the contents.

Said St. Peter, incredulously:  “You brought pavement?”

Lucralgia no more

My point is that, if you get old enough, and have enough, it’s all just so much pavement.

As a consequence, what hurt badly as a young man doesn’t sting any more.  Inverse Widow’s Mite, I guess, as long as I’m in New Testament mode.  I’ve found the solution for lucralgia.  Or it has found me.

Weirdly, I’m still as cheap as ever.  All those habits of thrift, ingrained over a lifetime, continue to function.

But when it comes to writing those checks at the end of the year, it’s just not the painful chore it once was.  I still find no joy in it.  It’s just something that needs to be done.  But I no longer have to fight down that pain as I sign my name.  It’s just another chunk of pavement.