Math in Transportation

My commute costs me $250 per year. That's in fuel. Its hard to justify the expense of buying a commute vehicle for $3000 when it will take me 6-10 years for that to make sense, even with fuel being $3.80/gal. However, is gasoline likely to stay this cheap? No. It will probably go up. Maybe from taxes, but probably from supply issues, even if there's no more war in the Middle East. Yeah. "Pull the other one. It's got bells on it." Imagine Alan Rickman saying that in his English drawl.

So you should factor that cost increase into your calculations. Pretend the price goes up 40 cents per gallon per year. We really are running out of oil, and what we can find costs more to get. That means your fuel may cost around $4.20/gal next year, 2014. Still a reasonable price compared to huddling under a bridge. In 2015 it would be more like $4.60/gal, $5.00/gal in 2016.

As you can see in this chart, gasoline prices don't rise in nice stable rates. They bounce around. When it passes a certain price, a country, as a whole, stops being able to afford it. This is called Demand Destruction. It makes the Peak Oil mess way more complicated. This is also why we aren't seeing $300/bbl pricing. Demand destruction hit at $100/bbl and most of the third world stopped affording it for basic transportation. They save their fuel for emergencies. Demand Destruction, ironically, means the price rises a lot less than you'd think. So maybe 20 cents per year is more likely than 40.

Since we're also losing Southern Europe to poverty, they are demand destruction too. Guess they'll be fixing up their old Peugeot, Citroen 2CV, and Fiat 500 rustbuckets and riding scooters more. They're already doing that, especially young men in Italy and Spain since there's no jobs and no prospects for marriage without a job. So predicting the gasoline price and your amortization by fuel savings? Really hard.

Piaggio Fly 150: $2900 + Dealer Markup

One of the big reasons I like the MadAss scooter is it costs $400 less than the Piaggio Fly 150, it has bigger wheels than the fly, a better (safer) suspension for real roads with seams and potholes, no dealer "handling" markup (it ships in a crate to your door) and you can swap the engine with 4 bolts. Unlimited markup for uncrating is pure profit and that irritates me. I like doing stuff myself. It means I have control of my own destiny. As a Libertarian living in a Socialist country, that's a bigger deal than you realize, at least to me. Apparently many technology workers are Libertarians. There is no govt program for fixing code bugs. That's all on us. We become self reliant, as a group, and distrusting of claims, thanks to all the bugs we encounter in our industry. And govt is 15 years behind in technology so them telling us how to design things? LOL.

$2500 to your door.

As fuel price goes up, diesel becomes more important because biodiesel, which you can make in your garage or buy from a local dealer, is not going to be rationed like gasoline. If you have a diesel motor you can keep commuting. Diesel doesn't have solvents in it which spoils the fuel so it keeps forever. Buy when you have the money and the price is good, store in cans in your garage or an underground tank for later use. You can't do that with gasoline.

Or put in a motor optimized for vodka/ethanol instead of gasoline or E85. If you have a still you could be riding thanks to moonshine rather than going blind drinking it. Just don't spill the methanol fraction on your hands or you could die. Although, apparently, if you drink ethanol it will bind to the methanol and metabolize out rather than kill you. I've seen this in two TV shows so I'm not sure how true it is. Check with your doctor.

Buy a new engine online, ship by UPS, four bolts, oil, drain the fuel and replace with the new one, adjust carb or replace with a fuel pump using YouTube instructions and voila. When motors change to use available fuel supply, it still works as transportation. It's not perfect. You get wet in the rain. It's better than scooters and many other bikes. And 4 speed manual transmission is better than CVT in these hills. It has utility and will last into the gasoline apocalypse.

I'm sure that there is a market for diesel engine swaps for your Camry or Accord or whatever you're driving. It's just a shrinking market because the time of Wealth in America following WW2 is OVER. After the war, there was a significant income boost via interest payments from the Marshall Plan. Our economy tanked when those loans were paid off by the Europeans and Japanese. Suddenly the easy money was gone and we had to be efficient instead of fat cats. The Baby Boomers are spoiled because of this money they pretend didn't exist. Their parents would chastise them, but their parents are dead. Today we're all getting poorer, and only the Delusional deny this fact of life. There's too many models and too much variation to make engine replacement work by economy of scale.

Most cars are going to end up scrap. Melted down to make scooters like the MadAss because its 100 mpg and nobody has to go to war to build them. Unlike the Prius or Tesla, which requires lithium currently found in Bolivia, which is openly hostile to the USA and plans to raise the price of lithium to Gold levels. There's lithium at a mine in Nevada, but its production level is limited to natural rainfall which then recharges brine water in a huge area, which isn't much actual output. Not enough to give everyone Tesla batteries, even for their planned Smart/Leaf equivalent subcompact. It's a Peak Lithium problem. So we need another battery. I still see room for catalyzed rechargeable cold thermite battery cell, but it doesn't exist yet, not even theoretically. We don't have a catalyst to enable that. Or a way to stop the heat reaction and channel that into charge density, which is the whole point.

Available battery material (lithium) means there is literally not enough to go around for everybody who wants a vehicle, meaning having one is a good reason for carjacking, making them a bad vehicle. This means we still need internal combustion engines, and that means biodiesel, E85 gasohol, ethanol, and natural gas powered vehicles. Ultralight body panels for ultralight cars using those new strong spidersilk-equivalent fibers will be the end goal. We don't have mass production for that yet. So scooters or bicycles when the oil shuts off in a war or accident, followed by really expensive ultralight cars that get cheaper all the time. I figure 10 years from now we'll have those for rainy days. No A/C though. Keeps the rain off and has 4 wheels so it doesn't flip over and you can go 30 miles to work if you can afford it. The roads will suck so it will be slow going.

Hollywood is full or artists, not scientists, so they literally cannot conceive of the future, thus you never see a realistic Scifi movie. They can't do it. Someday people will LAUGH at scifi movies. The very idea of a high energy future will have people rolling on the floor. After all, where's your flying car? Where's your Space Elevator and suborbital flights and robot butler? We don't have the energy, the batteries, for that. The materials don't exist. The science is too brutal and unforgiving. In scifi writing, we call these "Yesterday's Tomorrows" and they're stark examples of bad prediction and wishful thinking by people whose job it is to imagine the future. People like me. So look hard at your cost of switching transportation and decide, before you spend any money, if it makes sense.