Fix your windshield for cheap

Several months ago I found myself behind a gravel truck on the freeway, and before I could maneuver out of the way a tiny pebble flipped onto my windshield and gave me a tiny crack.  It was just big enough to be annoying, but not big enough to justify replacing the entire windshield.  For several months I just lived with it, but it bothered me because I’ve heard that it weakens the glass and can cause more serious problems later if you don’t take care of it.

Fortunately I discovered that there are several cheap solutions, all covered by my auto insurance.  Windshields.com will give you a summary of the options in your area, customized to your car make and model.  In my case, there weren’t any locations close enough to bother, but I found that my local Jiffy Lube will do it too, while I wait.

Although the cost is covered by insurance, I was apprehensive about fixing it. Wouldn’t they raise my rates? My insurance company (Amica) said they don’t.  Leaving it unrepaired exposes me to potentially more serious damage later, and besides, the cost to fix it is pretty minimal.

A professional auto glass place will charge everything to insurance, so it’s actually cheaper than Jiffy Lube, which makes me pay $5 as a convenience fee.  But finding an auto glass place and scheduling an appointment is too much hassle, so Jiffy Lube it was.  And it really was fast: they had the glass repaired and I was out of there in 15 minutes.

They don’t actually replace the windshield.  They basically just squirt some special glue into the crack to seal it and prevent further damage.  Although supposedly this makes the glass about as safe as a full replacement, you can still see evidence of a crack, so it’s not a perfect solution.

Here’s how it works: the technician first cleans the hole, by drilling it carefully.  Then he uses a special vise to “pull” the windshield glass in such a way that the crack opens enough to fill it thoroughly with the glue.

 

The glue is essentially a special transparent resin that seals the glass and prevents further damage.

You can’t use this process for cracks longer than 6 inches, but for marks like mine it seems just perfect.

Prius Gas Mileage

I’m having fun computing the long-term gas mileage for my 2007 Prius Touring Edition.  It’s now just under two years old, and here’s the chart for my cumulative performance:

Gas prices (blue line above) have plummeted so much lately that my fill-up last Friday ($2.499) was close to the lowest I’ve paid in two years.  The red line shows the most important number: how many miles I can travel on a dollar’s worth of gas.  Generally it hovers between 10 and 15 miles—at least double what we get from our other car (Honda Odyssey).

Prius Flat Tire

Work has kept me so busy lately that I haven’t had time to do much of anything, so imagine my frustration when I heard that tell-tale “pop” noise coming from my rear right tire as I drove down I-405 on my way home late last night.  But the car still rode okay, so it wasn’t till I was home that I discovered this tire was not repairable.

Immediately I checked PriusChat and found that the best tire for a Prius is the Nokian WR, which goes for something like $160+ each at places like the Tire Factory in Redmond.   Turns out that my Prius Touring Edition has 16” wheels, which are not terribly easy to find in stock in any case.  Other people recommended the Michelin Pilot Primacy (also sold at Costco), but at $163 it actually costs about the same as the Nokian and doesn’t get as good gas mileage.  Didn’t matter, cuz it wasn’t in stock at the places I called.

Argh.  Long story short I ended up going to my favorite tire place, Les Schwab, who sold me the Toyo Proxes T1R, for about $350 for two of them, installed.  It’s a sport tire, so supposedly I’ll get better handling, but I really wanted better fuel economy.  I guess that’s the down side of the Touring Edition Prius—you end up with sport tires because nobody keeps anything else in stock.

Of all nights to forget to put the car in the garage

I woke up to see the neighborhood blanketed with snow.  It's April 20th, for crying out loud.

Puh-lease, will somebody turn up the heat?  This is making me want to move back to California.

How CAFE standards hurt the environment

I never understood the argument for CAFÉ (Corporate Average Fuel Economy), the law that forces auto manufacturers to increase the miles per gallon fuel efficiency of their cars. How could it possibly be a good thing to force -- by a top-down Soviet-style mandate -- which cars can and cannot be produced?  People make a zillion tradeoffs when deciding which car to buy -- safety, size, convenience, prestige, economy -- so why not let the manufacturers make the same set of tradeoffs?  Interfering in that process is a sure way to invite unintended consequences.

Don't get me wrong: I obviously think that saving gas is a good thing (heck, I drive a Prius!) But if we think gasoline consumption is too high, there are far better ways to discourage consumption, such as raising the tax on gas, or for that matter, the tax on gas guzzling vehicles.  Or, as the Seattle Times writes today, put tolls on our roads and bridges.

But here's the best reason of all for dumping the CAFÉ: it hurts the environment.  A study by Andrew Kleit, from Pennsylvania State University shows why:

Because the pollution from a car is a direct function of the number of miles it is driven, and people in more fuel-efficient vehicles drive more, the net result from an increase in cafe standards is an increase in automobile pollutants.

If you think about it, this is just common sense.   All other things being equal, you will drive more if your car costs less to drive.  I find this happening all the time myself: because my car gets 44+mpg, I don't think twice about taking trips that I might avoid if I were worried about gas prices.

How much worse will the air get under the new CAFE laws proposed by Obama and others?

	% increase because of CAFE
VOC Emissions	2.30%
NOx Emissions	4.97%

These are increased pollutants that Kleit computes will result from the extra driving that is an inevitable consequence of raising CAFE standards to 35mpg or more.  The math behind this isn't terribly complicated: just ask how much more people will drive thanks to better fuel efficiency and multiply by the additional pollutants expelled per mile.

Now of course you can immediately suggest that we double-down on the regulations and force both higher CAFE numbers and lower emissions. But what will be the unintended consequences of that? 

Jump Start Your Prius

I was out of town all week, so apparently just sitting in the garage was enough to run down the puny 12-volt battery inside my car. A Prius actually has two batteries: one to run the car (of course) and the other to run the electronics -- and that's the one that was dead.  Next time I guess I better manually turn off the keyless entry system.  Whatever the cause, it wouldn't start this morning. One problem with a Prius is that the all-electronic drive means you can't even get it into neutral without the 12-volt battery, which in my case meant I couldn't get jumper cables close enough to start it myself, so I called AAA.

The service guy who arrived was friendly but pretty clueless about the Prius.  He eventually agreed to look at my manual and long story short, we got it running. 

Now I've had more time to look into the situation and I wonder why next time I don't just attach any old 12v battery.  Even the Toyota web site says:

Q: Can Prius be jump-started?

Yes. Should you need it, Prius can be jump-started with any standard 12-volt DC power source, and it actually requires less power than a conventional car. Simply connect the cable clamps to access points under the hood (which are connected to the auxiliary battery near the cargo area) and energize the computer. Then press the Start button to turn the car on.

In other words, a simple 12V power source, like the one in one of our emergency lanterns (or maybe my laptop?) would have worked fine.  Next time I'm going to try that before wasting time with AAA.

Forecasting Global Warming

 Scott Armstrong is a professor of marketing at Wharton who I remember as the geeky Decision Sciences instructor. He's an expert on forecasting, an important business discipline for market research of course, but also relevant for evaluating any long-term predictions of the future. His team runs a web site on forecasting principles, and publishes a book which is the standard textbook on the systematic study of decision-making about the future. His team has studied more than 82,000 forecasts to see which techniques work and which don't and one of their conclusions is that, without rigorous attention to some key details, "expert" long-range forecasts are almost always wrong.

This week he published a draft of a new report where he analyzes the IPCC's report on climate change (you know, the big UN-sponsored one that got all the attention earlier this year). Using his forecasting principles he concludes that the IPCC methodology is riddled with classic errors that essentially render it useless. Here are some biggies:

1. Forecasts made by experts who collaborate on their projections are weakly related to accuracy. The IPCC would have had better results if the various contributors reached their conclusions independently.
2. Even given modest uncertainty in models, the degree of long-range variability among predictions is so huge that you're unlikely to get valuable policy recommendations.
3. Models that "fit" to historical data, like much of the complex math behind the IPCC models, rarely produce accurate results without rigorous attention to details. All it takes it one or two unexpected events (volcanoes? El Nino?) and the entire projection goes out the window. He offers ways to control for this, but notes that IPCC didn't do that and probably would have had different results if they had.

Ever notice how discussions of global warming rarely (if ever) offer serious policy suggestions to fix the problem? Most recommendations I've seen on how to "save the planet" are worth doing for other short-term and very practical reasons: lowering your carbon footprint will lower your electric bill, cutting America's "addiction to oil" lessens our dependence on Middle East suppliers, a Prius is a fun high-tech car anyway, etc.  Nothing about that advice changes, regardless of the accuracy of these long-term (and probably inaccurate) projections. 

But don't be fooled when you see a company or politician use Global Warming as marketing spin to make it look like they have your long-term interests at heart.  If Scott Armstrong is right, the long-range forecasts are meaningless and may in fact be serving the short-term interests of people who just want you to buy their stuff or vote them into office.