I can’t get past how much the Tata Nano reminds me of a Cozy Coupe. Can I please get a red one with a yellow roof? Whipped out my favorite image editor and viola: Cozy Tata!

On May 4 Kari and I added a new option to our transportation network in the form of a 2000 Honda Insight. It is the 2224th Insight ever made, and is red with a 5-speed manual transmission. It is the cream of the crop for hypermilers, since it has Honda’s legendary lean-burn technology combined with a 5-speed. It had a LPG (Lifetime Miles Per Gallon) of 60.8 and 212,000 miles on the odometer.

Almost two months into owning it and I’m absolutely in love. We almost halved our daily commute cost, and have learned some neat tricks in the process.

The Good

My highest tank mpg was 82 mpg. I logged over 820 miles on a tank and put just over 10 gallons in it. It took me over 2 weeks to drain that tank, commuting 60 miles every day.

The car rides tightly and feels like a CRX. It should. It’s only an inch larger in all dimensions than the late, great, Honda CRX. It has two supportive nylon mesh seats, fully automatic climate control, an all-digital dash and a high beltline.

The trick to getting 82 mpg was twofold: reasonable hypermiling, and some creative use of cardboard. The hypermiling tactics I used were minimal, since I didn’t want to sacrifice safety for mileage. I would accelerate quickly, using electric assist if needed, to get up to speed as quickly as possible. Of course, “up to speed” is not the speed limit, it’s some reasonable speed below the speed limit. If there’s a lot of cars on the road it might be exactly the limit, if there’s nobody else it might be 10 under. Once at speed I back off the accelerator and settle in somewhere between 100-120 mpg, using the throttle only to maintain speed as needed, and holding the engine in lean burn. The lowest I would allow the instant MPG to drop in this scenario is 75mpg.

The tires are over-inflated to 65psi. I’ve been told this is insane, but it got be a couple more MPG. It’s laud as hell with the tires cranked up that high, you have absolutely no idea how loud it gets.

I drive with the AC off and the Windows up. Last week it was 103 so I used the AC, but it knocks about 20mpg off the ride. It gets really hot inside the car, so I’m dreaming up a cooling system for the batteries. I have no doubt that I can survive a 30 minute 120 degree car ride, but I’m nearly positive the batteries cannot.

The painful thing about pulse and glide (not related to the Insight) is that it’s not as simple as averaging mileage multiplied by mile to get a new average, allow me to restate an example I had read somewhere: Imagine you are traveling up a mountain pass which is 100 miles long, and you use ten gallons of gas to get to the top (10mpg). When you get to the top you turn around and drive back down, using only one gallon of gas (100mpg). The average for your trip is not 55mpg (110mpg/2), it is 18mpg (200miles/11gal). It means it’s a lot easier to LOWER your MPG than it is to RAISE it.

Of course, I mentioned a creative use of cardboard. I was looking at the car’s engine bay and realized that the upper grill does basically nothing. I have come to believe that it was a design concession:

Engineers: Here’s the final proposal for the car, sir, it has a .16 Coefficient of Drag (CD).
Lead designer: It looks like the frog prince and Woody Allen’s lovechild. Where’s the grille?
Engineers: It doesn’t need one, all the air travels…..
Lead designer: The grill is the mouth, it needs to have a mouth. All cars have mouths. Nobody wants to drive a car without a mouth.
[Engineers go back the lab, cut a hole in the front of their design and add mirrors, realizing this increases the CD to .25 and commit Seppuku]

So I went outside one day with cardboard and painter’s tape and taped over the upper grill opening. I refilled the tank and went about my commuting. Two weeks later I realized I had increased my tank-MPG by over 3mpg. I scored some plastic from Philip and am going to fabricate a permanent grill-block which doesn’t look like a big blue band-aid.

The weird

This car looks really funny. I think it’s awesome, but I get a lot of weird looks. It has fender skirts. It has a tapered back end. The rear wheels track narrower than the front. It has 2 rear windows. The tires are skinny. It doesn’t help it’s case much that it’s bright-freaking-red (Official Honda color code). It is impossible not to be noticed in this thing. We call it the “cracka’ spaceship” after an eventful ride through the 3rd ward where I’m pretty sure the look on everyone’s faces was saying “What’s that cracka’ doin’ in that cracka spaceship?!?!”

Our car stinks. We keep imagining the person who owned it before us. We know they had dogs, and let them ride in the car (bastards!). We also know they were hippies, because they lived with this car in Dallas TX (FRAKING TEXAS, PEOPLE) for 8 years before trading it in. Kari imagines a man, but I imagine a woman. She’s in her late 50s, with long, dry, scraggly formerly blond hair. She’s wearing a tie-dyed long dress and has big square framed glasses. Her pekingese are named Al Gore and Gandhi and she talks to them like they’re people. Kari pictures a guy, wearing tie-dyed shirt with 5 cats. I don’t know what’s creepier.

The Ugly

This car is slow. You can make it go fast, but you’ll only get 40-50 mpg. That sounds like it’s ok until you remember that you paid extra for a battery you’e killing, only 2 seats, and you’re going fast in a “craka’ spaceship.” If you want to go fast, go get a 00-04 Jetta/Golf/Passat/Beetle TDI.

The AC kills the motor. The Gas motor (ICE) has only 70 horsepower. That means when you turn on the AC the ICS has to work it to keep the juices flowing. If you want AC, buy a Prius, or a TDI Golf. You’ll thank me.

People hate me. I get anti-hybrid aggression quite frequently. Most of the reactions are positive (laughter, bewilderment, jealousy, suicidal thoughts at the gas pump), but occasionally you’ll get that one driver who wants to drive up behind you and flash his lights. You move over and he does too. He HATES you because you are one of those “hippie pieces of sh**” he joined the National Guard to shoot at in May of 1970. No matter what you do, he has made it his life goal to make you feel uneasy in your “environmentalist (pussy) tree hugging mother-f***ing little piece of Japanese you-know-what.” Of course, I LOVE those guys. I love them for 4 reasons: 1) He can only do that for so long before he has to stop to get gas, and I keep driving (we can do this 3 times before I have to stop) 2) Everyone that passes him thinks “what a jackass” 3) I don’t have to worry about pissing off the car behind me anymore and 4) It’s fun to make mad people even angrier.

That’s it for now, friends, my lunch break is coming to the end. Sorry for the PG-13 language at the end there, I guess it’s just a lot funnier if you read it out-loud with a Texas accent. Sorry I’ve been so absent in posting on here, I have a big post about PIER and my time (or lack thereof) there that I want to post, but it’s taking me a while to get my thoughts on paper. Stay tuned…

This guy should call AAA for roadside assistance:

View Larger Map

Seriously though, where is this place? Anybody know? There’s a larger village on the north coast of the island, but I can’t find information about it anywhere.

Update: Looks like the Island is names Tristan da Cunha. It’s been annexed by the British since 1816, and is a part of St. Helena. Any more info you can find would be appreciated. I’m so going… I want to run an internet business from there, how awesome would that be? .sh here I come!

There is good in most people we interact with daily, and we would all be better off if we all saught out the good in others, rather than the bad. Of course, Christians can’t ignore sin or real evil or injustice, but that’s hardly been a problem in the past.

This short film was created in 2007, and has a surprisingly universal appeal. It’s catchy, digestable, and well done. I highly recommmend the watch if you need to smile. It’s the kind of thoughtful peice that can bring tears of happyness to your eyes.

Cheers!