5th
The Feature You Didn’t Realize You Pay For (TFYDRYPF)
Just now the second wave of 21st Century alternatives to the internal combustion engine are headed to the mass market.
The first wave contained all manner of hybrid internal combustion/electric models, notably the Toyota Prius, but also hybridized versions of existing models such as the Ford Escape, Toyota Camry, Toyota Highlander, Honda Civic, Honda Accord, and perversely, the Cadillac Escalade.
Zooming out of the starting blocks for the second wave was the all electric, niche Tesla Roadster, which began dribbling on to the market last year. But a two-seater listing for better than $100,000 is not your everyday ride. 2011 brings the (perhaps overdue) arrival of the Chevy Volt, which unlike previous hybrids runs exclusively on electricity for its first 30 miles, and then transitions to its internal combustion engine for the remainder of the drive.
The Nissan Leaf is entirely different. It’s designed as an everyday car, with a reasonable price tag (more on that later) that just so happens to be an exclusively plug-in electric affair. With no internal combustion engine it has no gas tank. Also, no tailpipe. Just a honkin’ slew of lithium ion batteries, strategically positioned low in the chassis to keep the center of gravity on the Leaf satisfyingly low.
Also no oil changes and no tune-ups, because we don’t have any of those parts anymore. You just plug it in to the wall like a cell phone.
It also has a roughly 100-mile range on a charge. Filling up from empty will take most owners about 5 hours using a specialized charger installed in the family garage. We’ll just call that overnight charging for simplicity between us.
Let’s stop and think about that 100 miles for a moment.
I don’t know about you, but in a way that seems very limiting.
I say that because my whole life (and by that I mean my whole life since I knew cars existed and you put gas in them so let’s just call that since I was about 3 years old) I thought if I wanted I could just get in and keep filling up and go and go and go. Go until there wasn’t anymore go left. And for me growing up on the East Coast that meant the Santa Monica Pier, which was, in my childlike mind, the end of the Earth as I knew it.
Any moment now. I’ll just get in my car and drive. Just drop off the face and drive and drive. Until I see the azure Pacific and ride that Ferris Wheel on that pier.
Except I never have.
Which is to say I have, in fact, been to the Santa Monica Pier but not because I drove all the way from the East Coast to get there. In fact, I hardly go very far at all. Come to think of it.
Come to think of it, I might go more than 100 miles in a day maybe once in four or five months. And when I do, we take the “other” car, which happens to be a minivan that can actually hold all twenty thousand of my kids (which is to say three, but I digress).
The very existence of the Nissan Leaf (and the other 100% electric plug-ins of its ilk that will follow) means that I’ve been paying for a feature on my current car I never use. What’s that? The Feature You Didn’t Realize You Pay For (TFYDRYPF), naturally.
That feature is the dream to keep driving to California. Or wherever your mind’s faraway place happens to be. And tragically, I just learned quite inadvertently that I’ve been paying for this car feature all these years and never use it.
And I’ve overpaid.
I had a friend in college who really wanted to put all her music in her car. Back then, in the 1990s, the only way to really do that was to install a giant CD carousel into the trunk, which took up about half your storage space. You loaded your CDs into these clunky cartridges and then the carousel did something and eventually you heard music in the car. Except after having this behemoth contraption in the trunk for a few months she realized she didn’t really use it much.
Which brings us back to the car you’re driving now. It has this feature you probably don’t use. Or maybe you do use this ‘drive very far’ feature, but you use it infrequently. Maybe you do the math and realize that you’d actually be better off if you just rented a car for long trips. If you are leasing your main ride now, you may already be renting your weekend trip car because you don’t want to waste your precious leased-car-mileage cap on your weekend getaway.
If the 20th Century was all about the consumer and fulfilling our desire to use-it-all and own-it-all, the 21st Century is about owning the right tool for the job, and none of the others. It’s Swiss Army Knife versus the one Philips-head screwdriver you actually need 90 percent of the time.
Or maybe I’ve got it all wrong.
Come to think of it, maybe I’ll buy a moving van and use it as my everyday car because, yeah, I do move every few years, and I need one of those moving vans of my very own. Don’t you?
