Today (October 27, 2010), our dear and loyal 1995 Geo Prizm hit 200,000 miles. 200,000 miles! That is like driving from LA to NY 80 times or driving around the equator 8 times; almost the distance to the moon. If you replaced your typical day job with driving, it would still take you 2 years if you could average 50mph to reach 200,000 miles.
According to the DOT, the average car is scrapped at 145,000 miles. To put that in perspective, equating the average scrapped mileage to the current U.S. life expectancy (78.4 years) would make the Prizm 108 years old.
It has been through a lot over the past 15 years: 4 owners, several fender benders, 15 Utah winters, “jumping Wasatch” before they fixed it, countless trips up and down the canyons, teenage drivers, dirt roads, being high centered, etc. Basically, you name it and it has done it. It has been battered and bruised, dinged and dented, slid and squealed, and somehow, through it all, it still runs. Not only does it run; it runs great. Sure, it has a few minor flaws: the interior door handles are held on with Krazy Glue, the trip meter doesn’t work, the dome light doesn’t work, the center rear light cover fell off, the headlight cover is cracked, it is hard to shift into reverse, the doors leak water whenever it rains, it is rusting all over, the hood and trunk paint don’t match the rest, it only has two hubcaps, the air vents only point at the ground unless you cram something in them… You get the picture.
Earlier this year I started thinking that we should get a new car. I remember thinking that since I drive so much I should really get rid of this old clunker and get something that is new and more fuel efficient; something so I could reduce my carbon footprint and feel like I am not such a polluter. I started looking at the Honda Insight. It gets amazing mileage: 40 city/43 highway. You see those car commercials filled with green grass and blue skies and it makes you think that driving anything but one of those is like shooting unicorns with Uzis. I decided I would start keeping track of the miles per gallon to determine just how many little fluffy bunnies I could save by buying a new, more fuel efficient car.
I was amazed to find out that even after all this car has been through, I am still averaging 36.8 mpg.
OK, so the Insight gets 6 mpg better. Sounds like I should go with it. But, of course, it takes some energy to build a new car. I looked online and found a few websites about the energy to build cars. It appears that building, transporting, and selling an Insight takes about 25,000 kWh of energy – the energy equivalent of 685 gallons of gas. When you do the math, I would start saving energy and in turn unicorns and little fluffy bunnies after a mere 181,639 miles. Crazy! That is not what I expected. Of course that doesn’t take into consideration other factors, like safety, reliability, and the energy that goes into maintaining an aging car, but still, it is a surprising number.
I also stumbled across some articles on the stupidity of the cash for clunkers program. The website is still open – I just barely went and saw that I could have traded in a 1995 Ford F-150 for a Hummer H3T and the government would have paid me $3,500 for a whopping improvement from a dismal 15 mpg to a phenomenal 16 mpg. When you take into consideration the amount of energy it takes to produce a H3T, you would be saving energy after 283,010 miles.
What makes it all worse is that the cash for clunkers program required that the trade in car be drivable and then they would destroy the car by draining the oil and adding sodium silicate to a running engine totally destroying it.
The countdown (up?) to reaching 200,000 miles.
(While I, Lyndsay, would like to take credit for writing this post, I cannot. Tyler wrote it, which is fitting since it is his car. I love how he wrote about his car! It is a side of his personality that not everyone knows!
I will take credit for taking (most of them) and adding the pictures.
I added him as an addition blog author, so you might be seeing posts from him every now and then.)
