Locate an Auto Repair Shop in Big Bear City, California

Big Bear City, CA Car Consumer Discussions

Ah-Ha - The Truth

by larsb on Mon Jul 28 10:05:00 PDT 2008

Found the info I was looking for. It's because ethanol vehicles pollute less. And the "credit" for flex fuel vehicles is not huge - 0.9 MPG. House and Senate leaders last week reached an historic agreement to increase average car and light truck fuel economy to 35 miles per gallon by 2020. Lost amid all the hoopla is the extension of the credit for automakers’ production of flex-fuel vehicles—cars and trucks that can run on ordinary gasoline or E85, a fuel that is 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline. These FFVs use less oil, and the production and use of ethanol produces 20 percent less carbon dioxide compared with gasoline. A flexible fuel credit program, begun in 1993, gives auto manufacturers that make flex-fuel vehicles a credit of 1.2 mpg toward their overall Corporate Average Fuel Economy. The CAFÉ credit was reduced to 0.9 mpg for the 2005 model year, and this was supposed to expire in 2009. The pending energy bill will increase the credit to 1.2 mpg until model year 2014. Then, the credit will decrease by 0.2 mpg annually until it equals zero in model year 2020. There are currently 4.3 million flex-fuel vehicles on the roads. But the Union of Concerned Scientists found that more than 99 percent of them run on ordinary gasoline because E85 is rarely available to the everyday driving public. There are only 1,261 public service stations that sell E85 out of 170,000 service stations nationwide. But availability is improving: This number is a nearly 9 percent increase from June 2007. E85 is not readily available because the transportation infrastructure to deliver the fuel to service stations is in its infancy. In addition, oil companies have established roadblocks to the sale of E85. The Wall Street Journal found that “oil companies lose sales every time a driver chooses E85, and they employ a variety of tactics that help keep the fuel out of stations that bear the company name.” Oil companies’ efforts include franchise agreements with service stations. The Journal reported that these “contracts sometimes limit advertising of E85 and restrict the use of credit cards to pay for it. Some require that any E85 pump be on a separate island, not under the main canopy.” These barriers reduce the availability and use of E85 and therefore the benefits from the fuel. The House energy bill, H.R. 3221, includes a number of provisions to remove barriers to the sale of E85, including a prohibition on franchise agreements that restrict the installation of E85 dispensing equipment or limit the marketing or sales of it. The bill would also establish grants and tax credits to encourage stations to install or convert pumps and storage tanks for the sale of E85 and other renewable fuels. These provisions are necessary to ensure that more service stations will sell E85 for flex-fuel vehicles, which will reduce oil use and carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming. It was designed to reward carmakers for building and selling cars which pollute less. What is bad about that? Well, it's bad because the intent of the law is being subverted. See this page for full information: Ethanol hijinks There is a lot more to it. Not well publicize but the Federal Government thru Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency grants the auto companies a significant boost in fuel economy calculations when alternative fuels are used (AMFA 1988). An AFV that uses E85 gets its fuel economy boosted by dividing by 0.15 (or multiplying by 6.67). So an AFV that gets real world 20 mpg is calculated at 133 mpg. But the Government recognizes that E85 would only be used about 50% of the time (actually it is less than 1% of the time), so they average gasoline fuel economy with alternative motor fuel, fuel economy to get an average. Engines burning E85 do emit about 20% less CO2 per mile but have the same emission air pollution rating. E85 is also higher octane which allows it to be used where premium fuel would be required. Here is an example. GM sold about 636,000 Chevrolet Silverado pickup trucks in 2006. The standard Silverado is rated at 17 mpg city and 21 mpg highway with standard gas. With E85 the numbers are about 25% worse since ethanol does not contain as much energy as gasoline per gallon. However, when the real E85 fuel economy is divided by 0.15 the alternative fuel economy for CAFE calculations is 85 mpg/105 mpg. In the final calculation for half and half use, the composite fuel economy comes out as 31 mpg versus 18.6 mpg for a straight gasoline truck. Did you know this? Well now you do. So this allows GM and others to use this higher fuel economy to avoid huge penalties and build and sell more big gas guzzling trucks & SUV’s. In 2006 GM built enough high volume cars and trucks with flex fuel to meet CAFE. Assuming they did this perfectly will they avoided a 0.9 mpg CAFE penalty? This calculates out at $5/0.1 mpg missed in CAFE x 9 missed tenths mpg gallon x 4,860,000 cars and trucks sold = $212M. Is that the environmental and energy security issue the original law had intended? We don’t think so. Bottom-line has the absolute opposite. Gas consumption has not gone down. Alternative fuel consumption has risen slowly. So the INTENT of the guvmint was not wrong. The execution has been though.

From the Founder of the Weather Channel

by gagrice on Fri Jun 13 06:56:40 PDT 2008

I go with John Coleman. He gets the weather prediction right more than the rest. Global Warming and the Price of a Gallon of Gas by John Coleman You may want to give credit where credit is due to Al Gore and his global warming campaign the next time you fill your car with gasoline, because there is a direct connection between Global Warming and four dollar a gallon gas. It is shocking, but true, to learn that the entire Global Warming frenzy is based on the environmentalist’s attack on fossil fuels, particularly gasoline. All this big time science, international meetings, thick research papers, dire threats for the future; all of it, comes down to their claim that the carbon dioxide in the exhaust from your car and in the smoke stacks from our power plants is destroying the climate of planet Earth. What an amazing fraud; what a scam. The future of our civilization lies in the balance. That’s the battle cry of the High Priest of Global Warming Al Gore and his fellow, agenda driven disciples as they predict a calamitous outcome from anthropogenic global warming. According to Mr. Gore the polar ice caps will collapse and melt and sea levels will rise 20 feet inundating the coastal cities making 100 million of us refugees. Vice President Gore tells us numerous Pacific islands will be totally submerged and uninhabitable. He tells us global warming will disrupt the circulation of the ocean waters, dramatically changing climates, throwing the world food supply into chaos. He tells us global warming will turn hurricanes into super storms, produce droughts, wipe out the polar bears and result in bleaching of coral reefs. He tells us tropical diseases will spread to mid latitudes and heat waves will kill tens of thousands. He preaches to us that we must change our lives and eliminate fossil fuels or face the dire consequences. The future of our civilization is in the balance. With a preacher’s zeal, Mr. Gore sets out to strike terror into us and our children and make us feel we are all complicit in the potential demise of the planet. Here is my rebuttal. There is no significant man made global warming. There has not been any in the past, there is none now and there is no reason to fear any in the future. The climate of Earth is changing. It has always changed. But mankind’s activities have not overwhelmed or significantly modified the natural forces. Through all history, Earth has shifted between two basic climate regimes: ice ages and what paleoclimatologists call “Interglacial periods”. For the past 10 thousand years the Earth has been in an interglacial period. That might well be called nature’s global warming because what happens during an interglacial period is the Earth warms up, the glaciers melt and life flourishes. Clearly from our point of view, an interglacial period is greatly preferred to the deadly rigors of an ice age. Mr. Gore and his crowd would have us believe that the activities of man have overwhelmed nature during this interglacial period and are producing an unprecedented, out of control warming. Well, it is simply not happening. Worldwide there was a significant natural warming trend in the 1980’s and 1990’s as a Solar cycle peaked with lots of sunspots and solar flares. That ended in 1998 and now the Sun has gone quiet with fewer and fewer Sun spots, and the global temperatures have gone into decline. Earth has cooled for almost ten straight years. So, I ask Al Gore, where’s the global warming? The cooling trend is so strong that recently the head of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had to acknowledge it. He speculated that nature has temporarily overwhelmed mankind’s warming and it may be ten years or so before the warming returns. Oh, really. We are supposed to be in a panic about man-made global warming and the whole thing takes a ten year break because of the lack of Sun spots. If this weren’t so serious, it would be laughable. Now allow me to talk a little about the science behind the global warming frenzy. I have dug through thousands of pages of research papers, including the voluminous documents published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I have worked my way through complicated math and complex theories. Here’s the bottom line: the entire global warming scientific case is based on the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the use of fossil fuels. They don’t have any other issue. Carbon Dioxide, that’s it. Hello Al Gore; Hello UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Your science is flawed; your hypothesis is wrong; your data is manipulated. And, may I add, your scare tactics are deplorable. The Earth does not have a fever. Carbon dioxide does not cause significant global warming. The focus on atmospheric carbon dioxide grew out a study by Roger Revelle who was an esteemed scientist at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute. He took his research with him when he moved to Harvard and allowed his students to help him process the data for his paper. One of those students was Al Gore. That is where Gore got caught up in this global warming frenzy. Revelle’s paper linked the increases in carbon dioxide, CO2, in the atmosphere with warming. It labeled CO2 as a greenhouse gas. Charles Keeling, another researcher at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, set up a system to make continuous CO2 measurements. His graph of these increases has now become known as the Keeling Curve. When Charles Keeling died in 2005, his son David, also at Scripps, took over the measurements. Here is what the Keeling curve shows: an increase in CO2 from 315 parts per million in 1958 to 385 parts per million today, an increase of 70 parts per million or about 20 percent. All the computer models, all of the other findings, all of the other angles of study, all come back to and are based on CO2 as a significant greenhouse gas. It is not. Here is the deal about CO2, carbon dioxide. It is a natural component of our atmosphere. It has been there since time began. It is absorbed and emitted by the oceans. It is used by every living plant to trigger photosynthesis. Nothing would be green without it. And we humans; we create it. Every time we breathe out, we emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It is not a pollutant. It is not smog. It is a naturally occurring invisible gas. Let me illustrate. I estimate that this square in front of my face contains 100,000 molecules of atmosphere. Of those 100,000 only 38 are CO2; 38 out of a hundred thousand. That makes it a trace component. Let me ask a key question: how can this tiny trace upset the entire balance of the climate of Earth? It can’t. That’s all there is to it; it can’t. (to be continued)

Re: How the Salesguy is really able to get perfect surveys [british_rover]

by fezo on Sun May 18 15:31:42 PDT 2008

Yeah, these days it's much better to let those that don't mind spending a fortune goto the big league games and when I want to see live ball to go to a minor league game. Here in NJ that was impossible 15 years ago. Now we have out choice of a couple of major league affiliates (Yankees AA Trenton Thunder and the Phillies high A Lakewood Blue Claws) and a host of unaffiliated teams (Atlantic City Surf, Camdem River Sharks, Jersey Jackals, Newark Bears, Somerset Patriots...). Cheap, entertaining and the players are actually hungry.

Re: boaz [nippononly]

by boaz47 on Fri May 09 17:21:11 PDT 2008

Are you telling me a Yaris as sporty as a RSX ot a Miata? I used to had a hard time keeping up with either of those two cars in my Focus cold air and cat back not withstanding. I didn't notice a Yaris as a class leader in the SCCA races I went to this year either. But I do know I have been passed by more than one Miata going from Mentone to Big Bear and not once by a Yaris. I am not saying the sub compacts can't save you fuel. But the topic is what is wrong with the sub compacts we could get but what is wrong with the ones we have. Some people like little cars, obviously I am not one of them. But I understand what they were created for. Entry level economy. Sports Compact Car, Motortrend and Car and Driver don't classify them as "sporty" cars they might say, they are sporty, Considering,. Calling them sporty is very subjective unless you can show some class leading racing results to back it up. Not what they feel like but what they do. Don't worry I don't expect people that are interested in a Yaris to be part of the SCCA sedan series because it isn't designed that way. ;) The new sub compacts we now see simply don't offer much more than the compacts we already had, unless you are counting more choices. Because the Civic, Corolla, and Sentra are not new sub compacts. And if I were to use your same logic wouldn't I get a Prius? I would save gas over every sub compact on the market every time I filled up city or highway. I wold be in one very ugly car and none of my shooting friends would talk to me but I would save gas and put 20 bucks in my pocket. And people are telling us a Prius is a mid sized car. I have already started saving on fuel by driving the little Pontiac 4 banger for in town errands. Before I moved down from the mountains to a small desert community I was filling up the Tahoe once or twice a week. The Pontiac got gas maybe every two weeks. Now I can go three weeks between fill up for the Tahoe and three weeks for the Pontiac. That will not be the case when I hit the road at the end of the month but it will be when I am in town. But until they come up with a sub compact that offers plug in hybrid mileage I think I will save my money. Or maybe I can find a old Metro or Diesel Rabbit and save even more fuel that a new Fit would. That is part of the whole problem. The new sub compacts simply haven't delivered on the fuel mileage promise.

Re: So I have been gone for a while??? [bumpy]

by alltorque on Tue Mar 04 08:02:09 PST 2008

Guess you must be right about the poor little thing having "pedal to the metal" the whole time. Just filled up my car and it's giving 35+mpg, (US Gallon equiv), over mainly motorway cruising, (70ish mph), with some city + urban driving thrown into the mix. :) Bear in mind this is a Volvo S60 D5, (185bhp), with a Geartronic 'box and the Smart looks pathetic. The Volvo has 10k miles on it so only just "loosened up". Think I'll be staying with the big Swede and all the comforts of home............despite diesel being around the equiv of $8.40 per US Gallon here in U.K. Unleaded petrol is a mere $8 per USG. Oh yippee. :( There are lots of small Euro/Japanese/Korean diesels that will make those Smart numbers look like a real gas guzzler.........and they have 4 seats. :shades: Not too hard to see why U.K. roads are not exactly crowded with Smarts.

motorcity

by marsha7 on Sun Feb 24 18:12:37 PST 2008

I have mixed emotions about the tax-free handouts from states to the Asian companies, but I tend to lean in favor of them...my reasoning may wander, so bear with me as I try and write a coherent thought... If we lose jobs under the guise of "free trade" (and I suppose we could argue that phrase for awhile, but bear with me) because our citizens want Toy/Hondas more than GM/Ford, then GM/Ford will suffer in the marketplace and shrink due to lack of demand, and their communities will lose jobs as the factories close... If newer manufacturers ( not to start a war here, but probably non-union) are willing to come in and build plants to service the Big Guy (the Honda or Toyota plant), it may be in the state's best interest to offer incentives to build the plant...remember, once the plant is built, that new state-of-the-art equipment will sit there for a (presumably) long time, much longer than the tax-free years the plant has been granted (often about 10 years)...meanwhile, the city/county/state may not really lose much on the downside because the original plant that closed will no longer pay (much) property taxes if it is bulldozed to the dirt and there are no payroll taxes or folks earning money if the plant is closed and everyone is laid off...so, as it is, the state has NO BENEFITS from the Big 3 plant (or whatever company it was) that used to be there, so by extending tax breaks to a new plant, they don't really lose much, and eventually the new plant WILL pay those taxes, it is only an abatement for 10 years... Meanwhile, workers are getting paid to build the plant, renovate the roads and railways, payroll taxes are being paid, workers are being paid to pay their mortgages and support local grocery stores, restaurants and hardware stores, the the economic engine (like it or not, this IS the TRICKLE DOWN EFFECT that Reagan spoke of in the 1980s) really is working, and the local economy can become vibrant again...yes, the county does not receive property taxes for 10 years, but they get a NEW FACTORY with jobs to compensate...then, 10 years from now, they start getting a sudden jolt of propert taxes that will continue for years... While tax incentives are not a federal constitutional function, it is certainly with the realm of state gov'ts to offer... And while a direct injection of cash to Harley Davidson from the feds would be wrong, placing tariffs on imported goods (competititors) is absolutely within the power of the fed gov't to do... Now let's go off topic and mention free trade...when I envisioned free trade, it meant equal access to each other's markets...in reality, it appears that other nations (Japan, China) put up "other barriers" (like endless inspections of each item, rather than spot check as we do) so our products take longer to get into their streams of commerce than theirs do in ours, AND THAT AIN'T FREE TRADE!!!!! So I have advocated what Pat Buchanan has called for many years, Fair Trade, and it is simple...whatever provisions the Asians (or Europeans or whoever) want in their trade agreements, we just mirror the same provisions for us...and whatever they do to slow down our products into their country, we simply do the exact same thing over here...they could NEVER call it a trade war or a trade restriction, because what is good for the goose is good for the gander...if we do to you what you do to us, how can that be anything but fair??? So, if it takes 60 days for a Jeep to get to a Japanese dealer, then it should take 60 days for any imported Honda, Toyota, Nissan to get to an American dealer...let them watch their products sit in Long Beach for 2 months and watch how fast those Japanese barriers come down...it could happen faster than the speed of light... I currently own American iron, but I have also owned Hondas and admired their quality and design...I am the first to stand up and talk about how I believe that the UAW has destroyed the basic quality of Big 3 cars over the last 30 years...and I also believe that Japanese carmakers are the SOLE reason that American iron quality is far better today that 1980... Having said that, I also believe that we should compete on an even playing field, and the Asians have set up the playing field seriously against us in their home countries, and our US Trade Representative should have the guts to negate trade agreements until the provisions are equal and fair... Anyway, that is why I am in favor of incentives from the states, because you are not comparing apples to apples...if the state was receiving all that property tax and payroll tax and economic vitality from the unemployed workers and the shut-down plant, your argument would be valid...but the state is looking at a local depression without payroll tax, payroll, property tax, and the ripple effect... Basically, the state, by granting an exemption of property tax ON PROPERTY IT WAS NOT GETTING TAX ON ANYWAY, they draw in all the other economic benefits of the new plant and all of its attendant trickle down effects, so the butcher, the baker, the hardware store, the grocery store, the movie theater, the jeweler, the auto parts store, the auto technician and everybody else now experience the economic effect of 2000 people who now have regular jobs... I fail to see the downside for a state to offer benefits of tax abatement to a company that seems to be growing, whereas giving those same benefits of abatements to a shrinking compant (Ford/GM) will not assure that the plant will stay open...whenever they close a plant, I am quite sure that the local property tax is never the reason to keep a Big 3 plant open or closed, so an abatement would really be a waste of time for the state... For whatever reason the Big 3 close plants (unions, management) property tax simply ain't in the top 20 reasons, whereas to lure a plant of a growing company, and also bring in all their supplier vendors on the coattail effect, simply by a tax abatement would seem like a wise and small investment for the potential economic benefits to be reaped... Further, to belabor the point...giving the abatement to GM may or may not cause them to continue making cars in that plant... But, from the moment the Asian plant breaks ground with the first shovel, hundreds, if not thousands of jobs may be created overnight, as concrete, tractors, bulldozers, railroad tracks are laid, roadways are expanded, and a 20 miles radius can suddenly become a beehive of activity that may last for years... What is the downside???...other than if Honda or Toyota goes bankrupt and closes the plant, but, looking at the market as it is today, the Big 3 share is falling like a rock and the gap is being closed by Toy and Honda, who seem to be growing daily, or at least they are a better gamble than GM or Ford... If I was a Governor, I would rather attract a Honda plant than a Ford plant, sadly, because Ford's future is extremely uncertain, leaning to the