Honestly? Both. The world needs both. I'm glad that Tesla is building a battery factory in Nevada, closer to the source of their critical Lithium supply. So long as Tesla had to import batteries build in factories, stage by stage, around the world, the costs would remain high and they were hostages to any part of the system that opted to go evil and ransom the materials. This is better. And Reno is Pro-Business so is happy to get the jobs and not cause trouble for the factory. The last time I went to Reno, it was cleaner than California.
As for Elio Motors, with their three wheel Elio-car, I want to tell folks, because the question keeps coming up: the motor is the water cooled version of the Triumph motorcycle engine from 1965. That same engine went into the Geo Metro, cars that you still see on the road today, 25 years later. Daihatsu is making them on contract, and put them into Suzuki Swifts as well. So the engine is well tested and reliable and despite being 3 cylinders and 70 HP, plenty enough engine for the little car. How those cars fare in highway crashes is a separate question. Elio claims they are tested and safe and will come with 3 air bags. Okay, possibly. Nothing does well in a crash with a big work truck or SUV, not even another SUV, and you always take your life into your hands when you get on the road, every single time. Even going to the store can kill you. Anything over 15 mph is potentially deadly. But real life is dangerous and if you wanted to be safe you'd stay home and order take out delivery food and pay for grocery delivery service till you ran out of money and then starved to death. Safety is just an illusion.
The Eliomotors car is a motorcycle for people who don't like motorcycles. You don't need a helmet. It has a windshield wiper and a roof. It has three wheels so won't fall over at the stoplight. It has a door and a lock. It gets way better mileage than a prius, and requires no lithium imports. Someday, when gasoline is closer to $40/gal, you can swap the engine for a diesel and run it on modified soybean oil based diesel or algal diesel. Not as convenient as the Tesla that plugs into your garage charger, but also not going to strand you when the powercell dies and requires a day to recharge. Getting stranded doesn't sound very convenient to me.
For most commuter needs, the Tesla is great, and this being an area with a lot of rich, retired people, I am starting to see them on the local roads. Eventually I'll talk to one and find out if they live up to the hype or have some drawbacks, like weight, or cornering on the slippery local roads in the wet time of year, which we have entered.
Jay Leno was a popular late night talk show host. He did this for decades. I wasn't someone who stayed up that late, so didn't watch his show. After he retired, very rich from the show, he started putting videos on the net about his car collection, many of which are classics. In a very real sense, he's the American Top Gear, only a great deal more respectful and far less flippant. He doesn't have the audience or mindset of Top Gear fans, either, and Jay keeps what he buys for the most part. He's got 1920's Dusenbergs, and a 1980's McLaren F1, which is an odd, very expensive, production sports car that's road legal, but being $1.3 million should rarely be trusted around traffic. Jay Leno's Garage recently posted a video on a visitor with the Lancia Fulvia Zagato, which was a car ahead of its time, and very interesting because of it.
Here's the video. I really enjoyed watching this. Thank you, Jay Leno. Your respect for vehicles and history makes California proud. I really think these programs are more of a legacy than all those years of late night TV because those shows are largely forgotten by my generation, but these car documentaries are valuable and will likely be referred to a century from now.
Having recently visited Reno and found it is in better shape than here, with a lot more operating businesses than here? Yes, I would move there. I like the desert. Thanks to new laws on Indian Casino gambling, Reno has less to offer that industry, and Vegas is newer, but also suffering thanks to the costs of fuel. Most gamblers would rather spend their money gambling, not getting there. What Reno offers is cheap housing with close access to the Eastern Sierra and Great Basin, which is very nice outdoors. Reno has a lot of bicyclists too, at least as many as Nevada City and I spotted a fair number of scooters operating too. Modern poverty, the New Poor, are mostly college graduates who put most of their wages into student loan payments, aren't addicted to drugs or living in slums in Oakland, and seems a lot happier than Old Poor. I'm sure they'll get run-down eventually, but the New Poor have every reason to start their own businesses in places like Reno where that's legal and there's few obstacles. This is a huge difference from California, which only really wants tourists to take out loans, spend the money, then leave, spending the rest of their lives miserable and trying to pay off the debt. In Nevada there is no zoning laws. You can do what you want with your land. Garbage dump? Machine shop? Horse ranch? Yep. Whatever. Placement of stuff in the area is a bit more random, but the economics are different and its a very freedom loving state, which doesn't explain why they kept electing a bigot to the Senate. Course, California elected a neurotic with PTSD to ours and her recent comments indicate senility just as badly as his. Perhaps if Nevada gets rid of the prick it would be worth it to move there.
Anyway, Sparks, a suburb of Reno on its east side, is a good location for the Tesla factory for some important reasons. Its got railroad access. It has major trucking interstates. The mine for the lithium they're going to make the batteries from is in Nevada, so its a lot cheaper to truck it there than to Texas or Detroit or whatever. The mine in question works by rain falling on a big basin of rocks, the lithium leaches out, then the water is pumped out of a well at the low spot in the basin, and the water then gets the lithium removed. Presumably to be sprayed across the square miles of rock again. Few non-geologists know this, but Nevada is full of volcanoes and has serious earthquakes just like California does. I seriously considered going to grad school at University of Nevada Reno for Vulcanology, mainly because its really interesting when mountains explode. My grim and dark humor funny bone tingles then.
See. Isn't that cool? The non-fiction section of the library has more fun stuff like this in the natural sciences section 550 ish. Also check in periodicals, though serious science papers on geology are either chemistry or environment articles in most cases. Chemistry at the small scale drives the large scale events like this eruption, which is mostly steam and carbon dioxide overcoming the ability of the rocks to contain the pressure. Geology classes makes this sort of thing a lot more dull. That is precisely why I opted not to study meteorology because I want clouds to remain pretty.
So I'm glad that Tesla is doing the sane thing and building a factory that's relatively close to the mine so they can retain control of their batteries and thus the price of the car, rather than be mocked for shipping the lithium to Germany and China for different stages of the process before shipping it back. All that shipping costs money, and its bad for the environment but the money is the important thing. You can't sell a cheap electric subcompact to the masses if you are putting most of the cost into the battery shipping around the world twice. This is better. So kudos for sanity.
Its going to take several years to build the factory and get things running before they hire anyone, but if you've ever wanted to work with lithium, which explodes on contact with water, you can certainly do so. Be sure to write up a will, and take extensive photos of your body to help the plastic surgeon if you happen to survive getting splashed and burned by it. You can even bicycle to work during the summer. Just understand that in the winter, they get some snow, and a lot of black ice so winter tires are a really good idea in that season. Upsides are lots of cheap houses from the boom are still sitting empty, and its a short trip to Tahoe and skiing if you like that sort of thing.
Back in the 1950's, Socialists in our government insisted that Soviet Era multistory housing projects were the solution to housing the Poor Black People in places like Chicago. They were awful and created crime and convinced blacks that our govt was out to murder them. The noise of shared walls lead to anger and murders and most people who live there think they should be dynamited because they've damaged 3 generations of people into crime and despair and poverty. Flash forward 60 years.
People who bought homes 10 years ago during the Housing Bubble lost their jobs and have stopped making their payments. They've been squatting in the homes rent free in most cases and are starting to get evicted. The banks are doing this quietly in hopes of turning the home over without wrecking the home values in the neighborhood and causing a tsunami of foreclosures, which they'd end up eating since many mortgages are owned by those banks.
Most paying jobs went to China and India, so few can afford to rent or to buy a home. Houses still cost too much for the basic minimum wage paid today. There are lots sitting empty, but their list prices are way out of the market, and the market is defined as what people can afford to pay. Every time the govt intervenes to regulate wages in an industry, that industry collapses and goes overseas. We no longer get paid enough to survive in America. The American Dream is dead. The modern version of Fahrenheit 451 isn't burning books. Its mortgage default bankers seizing your house and kicking you out on the street. "We're from the government. We're here to help."
The Left looked for new solutions to homelessness, accidently provided by the New Poor in Tiny Houses, which are essentially wood houses built on trailers within a certain legal size, towed on wheels to a site and plugged into electric and water, sometimes as primitive as a garden house and orange construction cord outlet. Sometimes they're actual cottages without the wheels, but usually the wheels are part of the tax evasion scheme.
The Left realized these tiny houses might work for the Homeless, meeting the unfunded mandates from the Federal Govt to house the poor. So now, what about unit cost?
What is the right sized house for a person? Working to an economy of scale, less is better because it will take fewer materials and more homes can be built. Realistically? That depends. It is certainly possible to live in a studio apartment of basically one main room with the bed and kitchenette and separate bathroom behind a door for privacy, however the close spaces do drive people insane, and insanity is to be avoided. Most people intend to be outside and not there as much as possible, and during the age of universal employment this was a solution. Nowadays with most the population (65% and rising) unemployed, many are going to feel trapped in four walls, as if they were in jail. You can leave but if there's nowhere to go, and no money to spend, this also increases crimes of opportunity and potentially insanity.
You can reduce the feeling of being trapped with large enough windows to give the illusion of a larger living space to the resident however windows wreck a home's heating and cooling efficiency and one of the reasons apartment blocks were built in the first place was more efficient heating. Turns out not to be true, however. I also notice that sufficient light in a small apartment, especially natural sunlight, helps maintain good sleep and wake cycles where they belong and avoid Seasonal Affective Disorder (seasonal depression), such as commonly found in people living in the Pacific Northwest and are generally fixed by moving away from the heavy overcast and down to Arizona or California where the sun shines. Since housing requirements are an unfunded mandate from the Federal Govt, imposed and punished at whim, solutions have to be economically viable and local enough. And if a tiny house motivates the resident to trade up and sell the thing off to the next poor person, so much the better.
I have found that the smaller the space, the more important it is that it be cleaned. A dirty space tends to get dirtier faster because you notice it and human beings are self destructive. So removing the self destructive tendencies in a space matters as well. As best I can tell, you need frequently cleaning, good air movement to remove smells, excellent light, and what you see out the window should be trees etc rather than another trailer or fence. A fence is just another prison cell equivalent. Same with the window of another trailer staring back at you. So how they're placed, and what barriers you have between them is important too.
Can we build tiny houses on trailers cheap enough and fast enough, with enough insulation and large enough size, that they can be carted around to various sites and provide homes worth leasing or buying so people don't have to live in tents? It wouldn't even be necessary if the housing bubble finished popping. And I think it might, though the delusions of the Baby Boomers is delaying this, possibly till most of them are dead, or at least until they stop wrecking America through their selfish voting. The jerks.
Can a tiny house really work? I looked into it locally, at a larger model, the largest legally available on a trailer is 399 square feet, by law. Its somewhat narrow inside, the ceiling is low in the bathroom to allow a loft area, and it had some other issues. For one, there's little point building these without the thicker insulation, and putting the noisy air conditioner in the bedroom may keep you cool enough to sleep but the noise wouldn't let you. You can put a deck outside, but it can't be physical attached, at least not permanently, else it stops being a trailer and you get nailed with assessment fees, taxes, and fines. The unit I looked at had a pointless loft for storing stuff and possibly as bed space for the unwelcome visitor, the kind that's like fish: nice on the first day, stinks by the third. I think they offer units that don't bother with that. Since the A/C was external, on the ground with a hose, it must suck all kinds of power to keep the place bearable when it is actually hot out. And in the winters, while the gas fireplace is decorative and requires no cleaning, I can't see that being as good as a simple pellet stove, which is far cheaper to run. Additionally, most of these things have very small hot water heaters. I would say they're a critical failing to offer a bathtub in a home with a 4 gallon hot water heater. FAIL! On-Demand water heaters are probably the way to go, so long as you've got the propane. As soon as you start working off-grid, a tiny house should get serious about a hybrid-Photovoltaic setup, with the panel cooling liquid heating the hot water heater and the panels topping off the deep cycle batteries, then sending the rest into the hot water heater since you're going to want that for bathing, washing, cooking, and possibly a radiator in the bedroom on cold nights. Efficient use of heat and sunlight will be really key to make this work. Even going oversize and moving the house around with permits might be better for the person living there.
Most homes are too big for one person, these days, and 1000 square feet is honestly enough for two people, possibly two and an infant, if we were a society that had marriage and the basic family. I don't see much evidence of that today. The politicians have done their very best to destroy the family. It is up to us to deny them, and one of the ideas I had was taking a big house and turning it into boarding house, with door locks on each bedroom, higher rates for the master bedroom, and the kitchen run for profit by the staff, charging for meals. That prevents the typical roommates stealing food issue. It also creates jobs for a couple for every one of these McMansions, provided there's jobs available. Once the bubble finally bursts the rest of the way, these 5 bedroom houses will get a lot cheaper, and ones in college towns will be able to shuffle through students like dorms, only with live-in security. It could work. It doesn't have to be perfect. Additionally, the garage can be home to a restaurant or repair shop so the caretakers can have real income beyond maintenance and rents, meaning a McMansion can turn into a business.
The alternative is to duplex a house, adding a sound-wall and dividing the heat and water, but that often means ripping out the drywall and gets expensive. Really, dropping the price of homes and finding a use for the space you don't need is the way to go. If we have to try and cram efficient heating and cooling into homes on wheels its probably going to be cost prohibitive. So tiny houses are a sort of solution, but bursting the bubble on houses with foundations is the better answer. Are you ready, America?
Frugal living is often a difficult pill to swallow. Most Americans are raised to be unnaturally materialistic. How many styles of fork do you need? Isn't one pair of comfortable shoes enough? This is the result of marketing, successfully, to sell stuff we don't actually need. If you can reduce your stuff then living in an RV starts to become possible in the real world.
There are many types of RV. A friend of mine lives in a tiny truck camper shell, while working for minimum wage part time in a job that keeps promising to hire and pay him properly, real soon. Its been something like 4 years of that ever-extending promise. The thing is tiny, just enough room to sleep, and sit up from sleeping. It fits over the back of his work truck. My friend is a mechanic and machinist, so can keep the truck going forever, essentially. What he doesn't have is a real paying job so he can't upgrade or park it in a proper space with trailer hookups etc.
We've discussed the merits of mobile living and I'm learning a fair bit about the upsides and downsides. I get to hear all about the dirty little secrets. For instance, you can price shop your mobile home space rental, but the electric hookup and rates are unregulated so you find out you're paying several hundred a month for turning on your lights and running your fridge. That's not very nice. Most mobile home parks do this, and they get a well deserved reputation for being run by @$$holes. Sigh.
It's a shame because there's an opportunity there, to provide upscale services, higher rents, code of conduct that's properly enforced, and proper maintenance of grounds and facilities so everything works right. Imagine a mobile home park with a good restaurant that delivers? And well kept, very clean showers and laundry room and a really nice clean swimming pool. Or manicured garden and BBQ area? They had that at a nice apartment complex I stayed in, in Rocklin years ago. Back before the economy tanked. If something like that existed (they do), it would be a viable franchise.
And 6 mpg!
Like with scooters, the markup on RV's is ridiculous. The big bus-sized ones are often $300K, which is really quite a lot of money for something that's probably around $45K in materials and labor to build. They can get away with this because most people who buy them have just sold their house in retirement, tax free, and know how much money they'll need, so can spend plenty "travelling", and tend to go the budget route. For whatever reason, they figure they can live for weeks at a time in an RV cheaper than a motel and eventually get to spending entire summer and many winters in places with good weather. Places with fantastic views. Places worth spending time in.
So what about used ones? A used RV varies in price quite a bit. Buying one that's been neglected after a few trips, after the owner gets cancer and dies and his widow sells it off to get rid of it, that's the best kind to get used. They often need some outside work, some corrosion repairs, some paint, but the interiors tend to be untouched so require few real repairs and can be turned over quickly for a profit or lived in. The worst ones are the ruined engines, broken suspensions, wrecked plumbing and electrical, damaged cabinetry, and a wracked (twisted/broken) frame that's been cracked and leaking rainwater inside the walls where its been sitting for 5 years growing mildew and dryrot. That would be the worst case. An RV that's scrap, like a house with termites. Any RV for sale which advises bringing a "tow truck" to haul it away? Yeah, better be a serious mechanic. My friend is. Thinks that he might be able to buy distressed RVs, fix them and sell them. I think he's right. Done economically, they can be resold for a reasonable sum rather than the unreasonable one a new one goes for, with fewer complaints or demands.
Around here, RVs are snatched up cheap, big ones to rich people. Small ones go to the pot growers. They upgrade from the tent or lean-to or ramshackle (from where we get the word "shack") after a successful sale of a good crop to the Bay Area drug dealers. They upgrade into a camper van, sometimes a camper shell on a truck. Often these are bought as cheap as they can get. Repaired just enough to live in, and jury rigged together with cheap construction materials like scraps of siding fished out of construction site waste, caulking compound and flashing to cover the leaks. Most of what I've seen was really ugly. These are not the efforts of people who care about their work quality. Anybody who thinks nice things about The (North San Juan) Ridge is someone not to hire or do business with. Rather the same with Chicago Park. Ever since Peak Oil screwed up the affordability of commutes and shut down so many businesses in Sacramento, dropping this entire region in the sort of poverty that caused so many locals to drop into growing pot, which remains a crime, to survive. Rich people still buy RVs to snowbird or escape the summer heat for the high country, or get a different view, but the poor skeezy trailer trash and pot growers buy RVs and trailers as cheap as they can get, and stay high or drunk as long as they live, which is often surprisingly long. Not much HIV around here so the local STDs don't seem to kill like they used to.
I've already written about trailers. And those are fine, provided you can turn around. An RV can be a truck, a van, a bus with a house on the back. It is self powered. Some have the engine in the front. Some in the back. Most have a generator. I would get really tired of hearing that run when I'm trying to sleep. Most RVs have poor insulation. They don't have to, but that insulation removes living space from the interior, and part of the point of an RV is you go where the weather is nice and there's a pleasant view. Top Gear says that British people buy more caravans and RVs than any country in Europe, so must enjoy this. He also pointed out that you can buy a fun hatchback instead of a pulling vehicle and spend the difference on a really fancy holiday in a hotel. Which is absolutely true.
So why would you want an RV anyway? Well... in a situation where you've had a housing bubble, one that's resulted in an unstable economy with low wages, low job security, govt with high taxes but apparently no services to your own ethnic group, racist and sexist hiring practices for the few jobs left, and growing instability in laws and taxation meaning settling in one place is asking to get hit with life altering and ruinous bills you can't predict and prevent success? Something like reality. An RV could be your best bet to stay away from the crazy, move on, and be somewhere else.
An RV can unhook from the water, sewer, and electrical, top off the gas tank, and go somewhere better. This will seem attractive once you get stuck in life that makes you unhappy. Sometimes leaving really is the right answer. There are many places where abusive employment is the only kind, and poverty and exploitation are considered normal. There's a good reason people are leaving. Flee the trap. Your elders built it to hurt you, to enslave you. Flee. A house on wheels is a statement of freedom, just be sure to move it from time to time.
