TCO doesn’t mean squat when you can’t afford to buy the car.

I paid 3k cash for my car.

I mean, people still believe the earth is flat, ffs.

I like the idea of a plug in hybrid.

But there’s a lot more to a car for me. I need it to be affordable. I need replacement parts to also be affordable, and I need it to be user serviceable.

This is why my 20 year old Honda, and my wife’s 13 year old Lexus are both ideal.

Mine is a Honda, which means parts are everywhere, even in the deep deep south. It’s easy to repair basically any issue with it. I have no car note, and liability insurance is $32 a month for it.

Hers is a Lexus, which is for all intents, a Toyota. Which also means parts are ubiquitous. I swapped a water pump in it over a weekend. And I had never done that before. Sure, I’ve always done basic maintenance, but until about 3 years ago, I didn’t trust myself to do anything more in depth.

When my previous car (also a Honda) had a head gasket failure, I swapped it. Took me several months because I was learning as I went. But I did it.

Why? I had no choice. Couldn’t afford another car, and couldn’t afford the 2 to 4 hour labor rates a $20 gasket needed. What would’ve cost 500 to 600 bucks if I’d had someone else do it, wound up costing me less than $150. Had the head machined at a local machine shop, and that less than 150 bucks included that cost.

As I’ve heard my entire life, “po folks gots po ways”

Consistently. Like the 500mL bottle of water I’m currently drinking in coastal Alabama?

Like the 2 and 3L sodas sold in stores all across the USA as far back as I can remember? I’m about a month and a half away from 50 years old btw.

Or maybe like how all our drugs medicines, over the counter, and yes, even the illegal ones, are all in milligrams or grams?

Or our military using kilometers to measure distance across land, although calling it a klick because it’s faster to say than kilometer?

Or how most of our weapons are measured in millimeters?

That sort of consistency?

It’ll be enforced just like child porn laws are. If you have enough money or political power (same thing really) then you won’t ever see a cop.

But us regular citizens will get fucked. Par for the course for a powerful, authoritarian government.

Authoritarians just doing what authoritarians do.

It always starts small. I started with a 15 year old pre-ryzen AMD laptop, and an old external USB 4TB hard drive. NEW the laptop was $299.

A year later, I have a ruckus/brocade managed switch, a Lenovo M700 Tiny running home assistant and Jellyfin, while my main media/file server is a Xeon E3-1275v3 with 2 SSDs, and 6 8TiB SAS3 enterprise hard drives in a ZFS pool. And a Pi5 running adguard home as my DNS server.

And I’ve already used 60% of it. 🤣🤣

No, I’m complaining that things like gnome and KDE all expect systemd and all of its associated other poeterring BS.

I don’t run Linux AT ALL.

More and more, Linux is becoming Microsoft. “Oh, your system doesn’t run systemd? Good luck using anything else loser!”

Exactly.

I’ve looked at the leaf. The local container shipping port uses them inside the port.

The biggest issue I have with it is going to make me sound like I’m just making excuses. But I live 25ish miles, in each direction, from my job.

The “official” range is, if I recall right, about 70 miles. And I need about 50ish a day. that makes me extremely nervous, especially since the used market is very much “buyer beware”.

Is the 10+ year old battery going to have enough life in it for that to still be accurate?

Can’t plug in at work.

I would probably be happier if I could actually find a PHEV for about that, rather than a true hybrid.

Another issue is, those may exist in your market, but they don’t in mine. Out of curiosity, I looked. The only used EV I could find within 100 miles of me was a Ford C Max. For 7k.

I live in an area where the used market is full of used trucks that get worse mileage than even my V6 Honda, for 3 to 4x what I paid for it. And the occasional clapped out Nissan that looks like it was ran over by a train. And I won’t touch a Nissan made after 2004. POS CVT.

Man, I would absolutely love an EV. As long as it’s paid off, and I can keep minimum liability insurance on it.

You completely missed my entire point.

They haven’t existed long enough for those of us struggling, and anyone who can afford one isn’t really struggling, they just think they are.

If you’re poor, you learn how to do these things.

It’s less about the gas and electricity than it is about adding a car note and higher insurance.

I live on the southern US coast. Unless I drive it straight into the Gulf, it isn’t likely to rust away. It’s a Honda, not a Dodge. 🤣

A hundred or two a month won’t help me afford a $300 car note and a much higher insurance premium.

My salvage title 2006 Honda Accord cost me $3200 in cash over 3 years ago.

Since then, I’ve spent maybe another $2000 total on ALL service and maintenance. Including a full set of tires, an alignment, oil changes, brake pads and rotors. A pair of wheel bearings, a new radiator, and a pair of tie rod ends.

All of which I did myself.

Oh, and my monthly insurance premium for this car?

$32 a month. No car note. “But electric cars don’t buy gas either” No. They use electricity. And my average monthly power bill is already over $400 a month. You think I want that to be even higher? No way.

Yea, I get that EVs are better.

But I don’t do car notes. I can’t AFFORD to do car notes.

So until I can buy a 17 year old EV for $3200 cash and only need another couple thousand to keep it running for an additional 3 years, I will stick to the used ICE market.

My highest of the last year:

Last month:

Still gaming on a Vega56 @ 1080p.

No no no.

Lean beef is a cow with THREE legs.

A cow with TWO legs is your mom.