September 22 - Jim's motor vehicles

Not only am I a bike junky, I am a reformed motorhead. My first “street legal” car was when at 17 years old in 1979, I owned a 1969 Plymouth Sport Satellite with a large enough V-8 motor with 3 sets of carburetors to generate power enough to now supply electricity to a small town for ever and ever. That car today, if still around, is worth a small fortune. I sold the car to pay college bills to get my degree in Environmental Science - there might be something to this? Since my MOPAR days (or daze) it has been VW's, bicycles, and small foot-print vehicles. Those days, a 20-gallon tank of high octane gasoline and a can of octane booster was $20.00 - yeh, like in the late 1970’s I had that much money to burn....., and as I recall, it wasn’t all that fun.

$44.10 today. A year ago $25.00. What will it be next month to fill up the minivan? I see $5.00 per gallon of regular on the horizon. When we get to $5.00 per gallon, I see us all on the edge of a socio-environmental revolution/evolution. Change is good. Pinching the pocketbook is bad. But seeing that I am very rich, yet perpetually poor, higher energy costs are just an added layer of expense to which I can borrow from the future to pay for today - good system, right? If for years deficit spending has been O.K. and working well for the government, it should work for me, right?...... [Note: The minivan has an 18 gallon fuel tank. It takes me about 4 weeks to burn through 3/4 of a tank. The vehicle gets used about every other day to move 4 or more people to here to there around town, and it is used on road trips which aren't being considered here. The VW Beatle (@31+ MPG) is used for moving groups of 4 or less around town, and many times a day on really nice sunny days - this is a convertible New Beatle, wouldn't you indulge a little here?]

I own (vehicle No. 3) a Ford F150 pickup truck. "The best selling vehicle in America!", or something like that according to one of those over paid consulting firms that benchmarks statistics of consumer over consumption. Also, with the amount of recall notices I have received from FORD, perhaps "best" is a term better left in the eye of the beholder/owner. Yes, there are a lot of F150's out there, and I suggest there are too many, especially the elevated, painted, testosterone inject behemoths that burst the boundary of utilitarianism by miles, if not light years. Usually, I drive mine when (1) I am saving the world and responding to environmental incidents and I need to carry Hazmat equipment, or when (2) my home business has a need to move large volumes of material, that it does often. Because my truck only has a V-6 engine (note: an engine smaller than most minivans), it is amazingly fuel thrifty. I drive the truck once, usually twice a week for load carrying missions, and when I feel like it, a third time on dates with my wife or when I want to feel competitive with SUV drivers. On the highway, with a 1,000 pound load, I get an honest 25 MPG – but I consider this is appropriate use of a motor vehicle (what do you think?). Here, I clearly do not have a single occupant vehicle on a daily commute. My F150 is a workhorse, and it is for sale - $14,000.00, 2002 F150 Supercab (4-door, 2-regular front and 2-small rear suicide), V-6, Automatic w/overdrive, A/C, cruise, AM/FM/CD, sprayed-on epoxy bed liner. I last filled up with gasoline in August costing $1.98 per gallon. I am still at 1/3 tank. This truck is awesome.

Regarding beer runs, this is work only for a bicycle. The bicycle applied for transportation beer is appropriate for many reasons, but mainly for the fact you can’t drink too much beer and then ride a bicycle – it just doesn’t work. This isn’t rocket scientist work, just recognition that too much coordination and sense of your surroundings are required to move a bicycle forward without falling over. Once coordination (3 or 5 beers later) is lost, the bicycle doesn’t go too far, the rider ends up upside down a few feet from the start point, and well, you paint that picture from here…..