#economical cars

[motorvibez]

In an era where fuel efficiency increasingly dictates consumer choices, MotorVibez's roundup of the "Top 10 Most Economical Cars 2024" presents a compelling guide for prospective buyers. Highlighting a range from stalwart hybrids to innovative diesels, this list not only details each vehicle's fuel consumption but also delves into aspects like design, comfort, and overall performance. Whether you're navigating city streets or planning long-distance travels, these picks promise to optimize both your environmental footprint and fuel economy, making them worthy of consideration for any eco-conscious driver.

[rotzaprachim]

"i voted for him because MY groceries are expensive" says woman who voted for the man with the Adding Additional Prices to Goods Campaign

[nerdy-hyperfixations]

Thinking about how if Shermy Pines. And like, if he is the baby, he’d be born in the 1970s and be 40 by 2012 and he’s already a grandad. He had to be a teen dad in the 80s (after a severe economic recession) and then his kid ended up being a teen parent by 1999 (Which is 8 years before ANOTHER SEVERE ECONOMIC RECESSION LOL)

Also he was born into a pretty broken family, probably rarely if ever saw his brothers. Do you think he ever saw Stanley before he had to start pretending to be Ford? Do you think Ford visited from college??? Because he didn’t seem confident facing his father until he made millions, so like???

And, like, do you think Filbrick and Caryn changed as parents by the time they raised Shermy? Because it seems like a trend that as parents get older they mellow out a bit, so Shermy probably has a completely different experience with their parents then Stan and Ford, and talking to them is just “is this seriously the same parents???” (Imagine the silent resentment that’d cause 😭😭😭)

Personally I headcannon that Shermy had a daughter (Mabel and Dipper’s mom) and not a son like it says on the wiki because c’mon. Can he just have a daughter. Idk why this is important to me but… c’mon. Can he just have a daughter. It just feels right to me.

[maybe-boys-do-love]

A Tale of a Thousand Stars answers the age-old question: What if Hallmark movies were good?

[bijoumikhawal]

Hiiii. My apartment will accept my application but they want two months of a deposit upfront by Wednesday, and because I've had to do repairs on my car that's stretching my money tight. So I am again bumping my Kofi (ko-fi.com/rosebijoumme) and making mention that I am willing to short fanfic writing commissions of properties I am familiar with (say, 500 words for $15). If you appreciate the funny words I say, drawings, or my research posts about Egypt, helping me out with this is a nice way to express that. I do hate to rattle my tincan but they want around $90 dollars more than I have on hand, and I do need gas back and forth until my next check on December (which is often around 150-200$, it's been on the lower side lately and having to pay so much is why I'm moving).

[catenary-chad]

Early uses of electric trains (that may surprise you)

This doesn’t explicitly apply about any canon characters, though you could use it to expand on/reinterpret Electra, the Nationals, or make OCs. I’ve just noticed a lot of people in the Stex fandom, and even just general railfans, that don’t realize that electrification historically has had waaaay more uses than environment friendliness and high speeds. Here are some other things it was used for in the days before global warming was on anyone’s radar and smoke was considered a sign of prosperity (the early-mid 20th century)

TUNNELS- burning things in enclosed spaces is a pretty well known way to get carbon monoxide poisoning. Even open-ended but long, slow-speed tunnels had issues with smoke and exhaust from steam and even diesel engines lingering and blocking vision/suffocating people, leading to gas masks or cab forward engines being used. So these became some of the first places to require electrification. And it wasn’t just subways, you also had underground mines and long tunnels through the mountains like the Cascades Tunnel.

HILLS: Due to electric motors being strongest at low speeds (and steam engines being strongest at full speed) and much better power to weight ratio, electric trains are REALLY good on steep, long inclines, especially if there’s any stopping involved. The Milwaukee Road’s Pacific Extension, the Virginian Railway, and basically the entire country of Switzerland are fun examples of early electric lines on rugged mountainsides where even very large steam engines struggled. On top of that, running downhill with regenerative brakes dramatically axes the amount of total power used. And as an added weird bonus, extreme low temperatures and lower oxygen at high altitudes impaired the performance of combustion engines on parts of the Milwaukee Road but electric engines saw no losses or even outright benefits due to enhanced motor cooling (cooling traction motors is a big deal and why a lot of older electric engines have such loud fans)

ACCELERATION: Electric engines and EMUS especially are great at stopping/starting quickly, making them great for commuter trains with frequent stops. This allows greater train frequency without increasing tracks, and is a major benefit of electrification even today (see Caltrain’s electrification project). Also see the GER Class A55 for how extreme steam engineering had to get to compete at the turn of the century.

SHEER POWER: It’s hard to overstate just how much more powerful individual electric engines can be vs diesel or even steam, not having to carry their own power source allows them to access a lot more. Just take a look at the “most powerful locomotives” wikipedia list, and that one actually leaves off a LOT of mostly older electric engines that would outclass steam/diesel ones included. There are a surprising number of huge early electric engines like the PRR FF1 with a similar tractive effort to later large steam engines (albeit a lot of these were slooow due to the aforementioned trait of motors being strongest at lowest speeds). This is also why high speed trains are almost all electric, their monstrous HP numbers are more to pull moderate loads at 200+ mph.

HYDROELECTRICITY: Using hydroelectric power was a practical and not environmental choice in the early 20th century and where it was readily available (especially where fossil fuels weren’t), electrification became very lucrative. Switzerland is the most extreme example, without much of a domestic supply of coal but a lot of hydropower. The Milwaukee Road and Pennsylvania Railroad also used dams as a major power source

MAINTENANCE AND LABOR COSTS: This was a bigger advantage in the steam era because the gap between them and steam engines in terms of maintenance and availability was so wide, and you can run multiple electric engines with one crew but double/triple heading steam engines requires one for each engine. They’re still competitive if not cheaper than diesel power today, especially on high-frequency routes, and especially when the costs of pollution are included. Electric trains are generally the lowest maintenance and most reliable of all traction, and tend to last longer due to fewer moving parts (50+ year lifespans are not rare). Now it’s more a matter of paying more up front and less on maintenance vs less up front and more on maintenance. The actual wires and infrastructure are a BIG up front cost that’s very hard for private businesses to do alone without government help (just see how many lines got bankrupted by these projects in the US in the early 20th century)

BONUS: this is technically a promo by the company itself, but it’s relatively willing to admit their faults, The Milwaukee Electrification

Goes into a lot of the points made above in a pretty fun and concise package

[afriblaq]

This KC blizzard hittin’ hard, and it got me thinkin’ bout when Tesla’s froze solid in Chi-town. Crazy how since then, Elon just doubled down on his DEI stance—some things never change. But if you want an electric car, why not keep it Black and roll with @derekautomotive ‘s Avani?

Avani

@bigcamiam

[andmaybegayer]

California obviously has many incentives to adoption of electric cars but a big one is just the high fuel price. And I mean I say high but while it's among the highest in the USA by a huge margin it's still not very high. It's comparable to and usually a little less than the normal fuel price in South Africa, or the Czech Republic and the rest of Europe, and that's without any Purchasing Power adjustments.

In most of the USA fuel is stupidly cheap! It's no wonder that heavy boxy vehicles propelled by inefficient V6's and V8's can sell and electric cars see slow adoption! You can burn almost twice as much fuel as Europeans or South Africans and with PPP adjustments you'll be paying noticeably less.

[robertreich]

The Biggest Economic Lies We’re Told

In America, it’s expensive just to be alive.

And with inflation being driven by price gouging corporations, it’s only getting more expensive for regular Americans who don’t have any more money to spend.

Just look at how Big Oil is raking it in while you pay through the nose at the pump.

That’s on top of the average price of a new non-luxury car — which is now over $44,000. Even accounting for inflation, this is way higher than the average cost when I bought my first car — it’s probably in a museum by now.

Even worse, the median price for a house is now over $440,000. Compare that to 1972, when it was under $200,000.

Work a full-time minimum wage job? You won’t be able to afford rent on a one-bedroom apartment just about anywhere in the U.S.

And when you get back after a long day of work, you’ll likely be met with bills up the wazoo for doctor visits, student loans, and utilities.

So what’s left of a paycheck after basic living expenses? Not much.

You can only reduce spending on food, housing, and other basic necessities so much. Want to try covering the rest of your monthly costs with a credit card? Well now that’s more expensive too, with the Fed continuing to hike interest rates.

All of this comes back to how we measure a successful economy.

What good are more jobs if those jobs barely pay enough to live on?

Over one-third of full time jobs don’t pay enough to cover a basic family budget.

And what good are lots of jobs if they cause so much stress and take up so much time that our lives are miserable?

And don’t tell me a good economy is measured by a roaring stock market if the richest 10 percent of Americans own more than 80 percent of it.

And what good is a large Gross Domestic Product if more and more of the total economy is going to the richest one-tenth of one percent?  

What good is economic growth if the way we grow depends on fossil fuels that cause a climate crisis?

These standard measures – jobs, the stock market, the GDP – don’t show how our economy is really doing, who is doing well, or the quality of our lives.

People who sit at their kitchen tables at night wondering how they’re going to pay the bills don’t say to themselves

“Well, at least corporate profits are at record levels.”

In fact, corporations have record profits and CEOs are paid so much because they’re squeezing more output from workers but paying lower wages. Over the past 40 years, productivity has grown 3.5x as fast as hourly pay.

At the same time, corporations are driving up the costs of everyday items people need.

Because corporations are monopolizing their markets, they don’t have to worry about competitors. A few giant corporations can easily coordinate price hikes and enjoy bigger profits.

Just four firms control 85% of all beef, 66% of all pork, and 54% of all poultry production.

Firms like Tyson have seen their profit margins skyrocket as they jack up prices higher than their costs — forcing consumers who are already stretched thin to pay even more.

It’s not just meat. Weak antitrust enforcement has allowed companies to become powerful enough to raise their prices across the entire food industry.

It’s the same story with household goods. Giant companies like Procter & Gamble blame their price hikes on increased costs – but their profit margins have soared to 25%. Hello? They care more about their bottom line than your bottom, that’s for sure.

Meanwhile, parents – and even grandparents like me – are STILL struggling to feed their babies because of a national formula shortage. Why? Largely because the three companies who control the entire formula industry would rather pump money into stock buybacks than quality control at their factories.

Traditionally, our economy’s health is measured by the unemployment rate. Job growth. The stock market. Overall economic growth. But these don’t reflect the everyday, “kitchen table economics” that affect our lives the most.

These measures don’t show the real economy.

Instead of looking just at the number of jobs, we need to look at the income earned from those jobs. And not the average income.

People at the top always bring up the average.

If Jeff Bezos walked into a bar with 140 other people, the average wealth of each person would be over a billion dollars.

No, look at the median income – half above, half below.

And make sure it accounts for inflation – real purchasing power.

Over the last few decades, the real median income has barely budged. This isn’t economic success.

It's economic failure, with a capital F.

And instead of looking at the stock market or the GDP we need to look at who owns what – where the wealth really is.

Over the last forty years, wealth has concentrated more and more at the very top. Look at this;

This is a problem, folks. Because with wealth comes political power.

Forget trickle-down economics. It’s trickle on.

And instead of looking just at economic growth, we also need to look at what that growth is costing us – subtract the costs of the climate crisis, the costs of bad health, the costs of no paid leave, and all the stresses on our lives that economic growth is demanding.

We need to look at the quality of our lives – all our lives. How many of us are adequately housed and clothed and fed. How many of our kids are getting a good education. How many of us live in safety – or in fear.

You want to measure economic success? Go to the kitchen tables of America.

[monkeyssalad-blog]

NSU-Fiat 500 C Belvedere by Vintage Cars & People Via Flickr: A cheerful brunette lady peeking out of the sunroof of a German-built Fiat in summertime. Note the stuffed zebra mascot in the rear side window. The car is registered in the city of Hamburg with black number plates of Allied-occupied Germany. Country of origin: Germany

[queercodedangel]

The automobile industry keeps lobbying and pushing against affordable/free public transportation-based infrastructure in favor of car-based infrastructure because it maximizes profits when people are effectively forced to buy, repair and maintain cars in order to be able to reliably get around.

Some americans will probably now be like "But the public transportation here is horrible, we need cars". Yeah I wonder why public transportation is so horrible in the country that's the raw embodiment of neoliberal capitalism. Almost as if that's an inevitable outcome when you have a country with an economy structured around profit-maximization by any means

[mychlapci]

i have a fantasy about driving a transformer around and for some reason, maybe some decepticons saw us or something, to keep our cover we've gotta stop at a gas station. so i stop, i park, i get ready to pump the gas, and they cant even tell me not to do it because that would give them away, so they stay quiet as i basically fuck their valve with the gas pump. and theyre squirming in their altmode trying to keep their engine from rumbling, fans from clicking on, fluids spurting around the gas pump as they struggle to hold back an overload... or maybe they overload embarrassing quickly and have to hold back the shudders as their overstimulated valve keeps getting filled...

[phoenixyfriend]

Ko-fi prompt from royaltrashpanda:

Saw your answer about why car dealerships tend to be in the same geographic area of a city. In my childhood neighborhood, we had a street with like ten used car lots all in a row on five blocks, and I’ve always wondered how that worked. They were much smaller than a standard dealership, and not all of them had repair shops attached. (Unfortunately that area has majorly gentrified and there’s none left on the original five blocks.) Based on your dealership research, what would be your take on tiny used car lots all being on the same five blocks? Also kind of related but not really, have you run into anything in your research about the history of the giant statues of men in suits that used car lots tend to have? If you have, I’d very much like to commission another question later about that topic because I’m so curious and have had no luck researching it myself!

My guess would be that they have a higher profit margin since they can probably leverage purchasing in their favor when buying those secondhand cars (especially from things like police auctions), and they can have a fairly consistent and predictable level of demand (there's almost always a new crop of teenagers getting licenses, without the cash for a brand new model), while the clustering strategy probably works even better when your business model appeals directly to a secondhand market where you might have a wide variety within one lot.

But let's see what the research says.

According to website CarEdge, some secondhand dealerships can have average profit margins as in excess of $4k. Now, that's probably skewed by some secondhand cars being luxury vehicles; there's a reason Carvana is topping that list, and most people do seem Carvana's prices on newer, low-mileage models are actually too high. The others are more like 1.5-2k profit margins, which is still respectable.

Granted, these are large dealership groups, rather than small, privately-owned businesses. Independent used car dealerships are looking at a gross profit margin of something like 10-20% depending on how well people bargain with the dealer, according to website ProfitableVenture. After the costs of owning and running the dealership (wages, mortgage, insurance, taxes, etc), there is about 2-3% left for the owner.

I actually want to quote this paragraph from them, as I feel like it's pretty informative on the issue:

The average amount of money that a car dealer makes per used car today is around $500 to $3,000 per car, with your typical run-of-the-mill used cars selling for about $2,500 to $5,000. Have in mind that profit margins on used cars are narrower than they have been in the past due to more information is available. Keeping profit margins a secret is what allows dealerships to take advantage of customers.

Now, that explains how they stay afloat, but the clustering?

...it really does come down to the same reasons as the regular car dealerships, but with the lens of anticipated costs. If you are a parent helping your teenager buy a used car, because they want your opinion and you're better at haggling than they are, then you want to make sure they get both the best possible deal, and the best/safest car possible... but also, you have work in the morning, and do not want to drive twenty minutes to each used car lot. You want to either be able to look up all the options on the internet, or hop from one lot to the next in the span of two minutes. Even with the internet, you want to do a test drive, no?

You also said that none of those dealerships exist anymore, which means they also predate the internet option. Being small means they had to sell fewer cars to stay open, but also that they didn't have the luxury of being a wide enough selection for people to do a cost-benefit analysis of coming to visit them with the expectation of finding a car when they might be able to see more options at that dealership that's only a block away from the other one. Without the internet, especially, their advertising would be limited to car commercials and newspaper ads.

(My thoughts go to Big Bill Hell's Cars and that Tobey Maguire Spidey scene where the used car from the newspaper is doing powerpoint transitions across the screen.)

So the clustering tactic is even more important, in that case. The only way to get your products in front of eyeballs is traditional media and in person, and it's a lot easier to make 'in person' happen if they're already headed to the neighbor.

[thoughtportal]

I cannot recommend this podcast interview with Cory Docotorow enough. It's about so much more than green tech and enshittification. anyone who uses the internet should listen.

[lesbiten]

i truly didnt mentally prepare myself for this result and idk what ill do if its not different by tomorrow lol