Taking Advantage Of The Bad Economy

Rather than pour more cash into the useless dinosaur that was my Ford F-150 pickup, I decided to take my losses and see what else I could be driving back and forth to work every damn day. For those of you who don't know, my weekly commute totals 800 miles. At the height of the latest gas crisis, I was throwing $700 a month into the gas tank of my truck. Car dealers were getting thousands of dollars over MSRP for fuel efficient vehicles, and then....

Wall Street decided to implode. Car dealers found they couldn't get car loans for customers unless they had excellent credit. Inventories backed up, and suddenly, it's a buyer's market again, if you've got a credit score that approaches the number usually associated with a Chinese math genius's SAT.

Now, I'm not strong on cash flow, but I do have decent credit... so, off to the Honda dealer.

Most Honda cars these days you find on American highways are largely built here in the states or in Mexico. That poses a little concern for me, as all USA manufacturers buy from local suppliers -- suppliers who might go belly up along with Ford, GM, and Chrysler. Only a couple of Honda cars are truly Japanese these days, and the best of them is the "Fit".

Introduced to the world about 5 years ago, and in the States in 2007, the Fit is Honda's smallest and most economical car, although with 5 doors and a tall roofline it doesn't appear tiny, the way the Toyota Yaris 2 door does. Style-wise, it is something of a cross between Toyota's Matrix and the hybrid Prius but with typical Honda styling cues. For 2009, the Fit enters it's second generation, with a fresh design and slightly more horsepower.

Honda doesn't import as many Fits as it can sell here, because they don't want to cannibalise the profit made on USA-made Civics. The Fit, being Japanese, is at the mercy of the Yen-Dollar exchange rate, and right now, the Yen is high, making profit on the Fit low. Sorry 'bout that.

The dealer had a record-high seven Fits in stock, and about 250 Civics. We drove both, and while the Civic has more horsepower, it also features a dashboard resembling a work station on the star ship Enterprise. Not that that's a bad thing, only it makes entry and exit for someone with a bad knee (e.g., my wife) a literal pain. Back to the Fit.

Honda is marketing the Fit in America as a trendy and cool ride for 20-somethings, but it was designed to really be a super-economy car for Europe and Asia that would have enough room for five adults and a load of groceries. It features the smallest engine available in a Honda these days, 1500 cc's putting out 117 horse-power. That's ten more than my old Mini Cooper had. The rest of the world can have an even smaller 1300 cc engine, but gas would have to get to $10 a gallon before we'll see engines like that here.

One lesson learned from my Mini is that as much as I like shifting gears, my commute home from LA is not the place for a manual transmission. Automatics are as thrifty, if not more so than manual trannies these days, so that was a necessity. Fortunately, the Fit has a very well designed five speed automatic that, on the "S" model, comes with a feature until recently you'd only find on cars from Ferrari and the like -- paddle shifters.

This was my first experience with the steering-column mounted paddles, and they work very well. In standard "Drive" mode you can use it to drop the trans one or two gears for passing without having to nail the throttle to get the car to downshift. In "Sport" mode, ideal for twisty roads in the mountains, you can lock the car in any gear you like for as long as you like, and upshift and downshift as you would in a manual transmission car, except that your left foot will be relaxing on the dead pedal, rather than working a clutch.

The "S" package comes with some nice 16-inch alloy wheels and fatter, 55-series tires, a bunch of silly plastic spoilers and rocker covers, and different interior fabric, all aimed at the rice-rocket crowd. All I wanted, as the Toyota commercials say, is my MPG.

So...goodbye Ford F-150, Hello little Honda. I negotiated my way into a payment close to equal the one on the truck, at a decent interest rate, and no gas-crisis "price adjustment" stickers.

The car is EPA rated at 37 highway. The EPA has recently redesigned its testing to better reflect the real world, as in years past, the highway rating always was much higher than what you'd really get.

It looks like perhaps they went too conservative this time. My first tank netted me an average of 46.7 miles per gallon, amazing with a "tight" new engine. I've since touched the magic 50.0 MPG mark. That's damn good for not having a trunk full of batteries and spongy regenerative braking, as the Prius has. Not to mention the improvement over what the truck was getting.

As a former "car guy" now deep into his own 12-step recovery program, I have to acknowledge that the Fit and all other cars for sale today are really just appliances, not the thing dreams are made of. They are conveyances, not chariots of the gods. The Fit is not something that 30 years from now people will wax nostalgic about; seeking obscure parts to restore granddad's car to former glory. Oh well. Still, I wish Honda could have come up with carpeting that doesn't replicate high grade roofing felt, and saved me the embarrassment of driving a five-door econobox laden with spoilers in order to get the paddle-shifter option.

The next five years and 200,000 miles should be interesting. Barring any test of its five star crash rating, I feel confident it will still be rolling along getting excellent mileage. Honda has drawings of a hybrid sports car floating around the Internet, so we'll see if that's in my future, should I still be a) employed, and b) credit worthy, both tenuous propositions as I get older.

Peggy Noonan on the Election

A terrific essay on Obama and McCain:

Declarations - WSJ.com

If You Can't Read This, Don't Vote

I hate to say this, but in these days of billion dollar elections, perhaps we should reconsider the literacy test for voter registration. Better than that, we ought to test everyone on the contents of their voter pamphlet before they enter the polling booth.

Yes, I know not that long ago literacy tests were used to prevent black folk from voting. But that's not what I'm aiming at. I want people of every color and every age to prove they know what they're about to vote on, rather than relying on carefully scripted TV ads and robocalls to influence their decisions.

The more the media have expanded, the signal to noise ratio of politics has increased even more. Between the pundits, the ads, the media bias, "political correctness," and your odd conspiracy theorist here and there, the general public comes to election day feeling like they've been through a war. Who the hell are they supposed to believe?

I say they ought to be smart enough to prove they can ignore all of the above and read the measured for-and-against debates and actual word of law as outlined in their voter pamphlet.
They can then actually weigh the pros and cons against their own personal philosophies and make informed decisions. Is that really asking too much of the public?

You would think that with as much attention Obama and McCane have received, the public would know their positions well. Guess what? Somebody took a camera to Harlem and asked Obama supporters why they were for him, substituting McCane's positions for Obama's. Not a soul caught the discrepancy. They all were voting on Obama's personality and color rather than his platform. I surely think Obama would be appalled. I bet you could have played the same trick on Sarah Palin's ardent supporters, too.

Now, if that's the situation in the Presidential election, what about senate and house races? Or local votes? Or state referendums?

It's time to take back the vote from the media and put it in the hands of informed adults. If you think politicians are scared of voters now, you ought to think about how scared they'd be if we all really knew the issues.