Jeff Bezos is backing a startup that will manufacture low cost EV vehicles. Over at Reddit someone thinks they spotted one being offloaded from a flatbed truck south of LA. From the look of it I’m not impressed, but they’re not making these trucks for someone like me. Last night I was driving behind a Tesla and the license plate was “BY2GAS”. Good for them. Nothing like virtue signaling that you’re saving the planet from global warming by pretending that EV’s charge up by magic.
Looks like a pickup version of Jeff’s delivery wagons which disgorge from the warehouse every morning
My “new” car is enough already. Yesterday I wanted to put GAS in it. It was a “HELO2GAS” moment. I should get a vanity plate that says ILUVOIL, but I won’t. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to open the gas tank, and even the substantial owners manual couldn’t help me. I turns out that the mechanical latch was most probably broken, so all I had to do was lift it by hand. I took me a good half hour to figure this out though.
There are many other things I haven’t figured out as well. Most of the buttons on the roof of the cabin for example. One opens the sun roof, I know that, but the others….?? The worst part about all of this is that sometimes you’re trying to turn things on and off while you’re driving. It’s dangerous not to know.
This week I have seen two mile long coal trains. So refreshing
I do like my car, however. It’s Porsche (yes I’m an elitist) and I’ve kind of always wanted one. It’s not a fancy race car model, and it’s a few years old so this is by no means a vast extravagance. I subsequently discovered however, that an oil change for these things costs about $300 -$400. This is because you have to unscrew about 2 dozen fasteners which hold a belly panel to the underside before you can access the oil filter. This sounds like a monumentally dumb idea, until you realize that the oil change interval for the Porsche is 10,000 miles or one year. It’s still annoying because mine’s telling me it needs one this month.
You can do it yourself, but I can’t be bothered. I have to find some mechanic that doesn’t charge dealer prices. I’ve always desired exotic cars, so I know what the deal is. My first car was a 1939 2/12 liter Riley saloon. If you didn’t know how to fix it, nobody else was going to help you. The Citroen CX was a real dream machine, and I knew a good mechanic, who unfortunately turned out to be an asshole, which didn’t really have anything to do with his car repairs, but car clubs and fanatics are useful resources.
The very first car I owned. The Riley 2.5 liter saloon. Oh baby
For the last five years I’ve been driving a BMW, which is still going. It had a lot of miles on it when I bought it, and now it has a about 275k. These German cars are built like tanks and go forever, my dentist told me yesterday. He said a friend of his decided he wanted to own a Bentley, he’d always wanted one his whole life.
Built like a Panzer tank
The guy buys his Bentley, and the time eventually comes for an oil change so he calls the dealer. Dealer says you can’t drive it here, we’re on the other side of the country, we’re sending a flatbed truck to pick it up. The truck rolls up and they put the Bentley inside a closed container and ship it off to the dealer. A few weeks later he gets it back. How much did this oil change cost him? Three thousand dollars. He very quickly sold it soon afterwards.
Tomorrow is Good Friday and the Easter Weekend starts. I may or may not write anything of substance for the next four days. I don’t know. I’ve been writing this journal almost every day since 2019 and since I don’t earn income for it, I’m not obligated to show up and do it to buy food or anything like that. I have to schlep up to Vermont at some stage and see what the winter has done to the broken down shack, and there’s always something that the ice has fucked with. That’s the part I don’t like. It’s how you get there and back that makes all the difference.
My haunted ’66 Fleetwood Brougham