Gas Price Check...

[CanadianChris 0]

I'm finding Gananoque to normally have the cheapest gas in the region.

[treble 0]

I'll need to check that out. There aren't any stations near the 401 that I'm aware of (at least close enough that you can see their prices from the road), and I think I've stopped there maybe once in the past year or so.

[Red Baron 0]

It's weird in the Niagara region. Fort Erie or Welland would be the cheapest, but sometimes its the Falls.

 

Port Colborne is always more expensive but when there is a spike in prices, Port Colborne takes a day or two until they jump their price.

[Damaramu 0]

So I hear the price of oil is going back up tonight.

[MarvinisaLunatic 0]

Gas was $3.45 here. I got an Exxon Card with 30 cent rebates for 90 days and 15 cent rebates there after since I always get Exxon gas anyway.

[Red Baron 0]

$16.05 a jump today for a barrell. Really...

[JJMc 0]

Yep, all because of what's going on with the financial markets. Things will get worse before they get better, but for some reason, I'm optimistic.

 

And mostly, the reason for the huge run-up today was because the October futures contracts were expiring at the end of the trading day and everyone wanted to get in before the price peaked. Now, the November contracts are trading at around $109. Obviously it could go much higher but what happened today was largely irrational.

 

$3.51-$3.65 here.

[Jobber of the Week 0]

Ethanol investor wants to kill the electric car

 

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — At MIT's EmTech conference, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla made a shocking assertion: Electric cars are irrelevant. Unless some unlikely breakthrough in battery technology comes about, they will never take enough of the market to matter. This is a financially convenient argument for Khosla to make: He has invested heavily in biofuels startups. But he raises a point few in the privileged West think about: Will the rising middle classes of China and India buy a $25,000 Prius, or a $2,500 Tata Nano?

 

Make no mistake: Khosla intends to overturn oil-based transportation, and make a bundle while doing so. He is a skeptic of corn-based ethanol, but favors biofuels made from cheaply grown biomass like switchgrass. But he also thinks combustion engines can be improved to reach 100 miles per gallon — a "diesel Prius," he calls. Electric cars? Too burdened with heavy batteries, too costly to ever make up a large portion of our transport. Oh, but just in case he's wrong, he's got a couple of long-shot startups in his portfolio which could make them practical.

 

http://valleywag.com/5054075/ethanol-inves...he-electric-car

[EricMM 0]

a shocking assertion

 

Booooo

[MarvinisaLunatic 0]

I cant believe that Chrysler would be like.."You know what we need to make to be relevant again..an Electric Sportscar and a Peapod!"

 

[Art Sandusky 0]

It actually is what they need to to to be relevant in light of their market share vanishing and a potential "Wal-Mart of Cars" business model. Honestly though, they're a pair of rushed concepts (the electric sports car idea is especially fault-prone as Tesla has shown) to show the government that they're worthy of the $50b bailout for the three Detroit automakers. The $25b that's mentioned in economic relief bills these last few days is only half of the total the automakers are requesting to save their asses. GM may be looking at its last calendar year of solvency and Chrysler is nothing but a headache for Cerberus. Ford's in better shape than the other two, but that's like missing your leg from your knee down instead of the whole thing.

[Guest Vitamin X]

What's wrong with the Tesla?

[Slayer 0]

There's no way out, no way out

[Jobber of the Week 0]

What's the mini white car called? It reminds me of a Smart, but a bit more attractive.

[MarvinisaLunatic 0]

What's the mini white car called? It reminds me of a Smart, but a bit more attractive.

 

Its called a Peapod. Its top speed is a whopping 25 mph. Its nothing more than a golfcart on steroids.

 

Also, Glenn Beck's tv show on Headline News is live in 5 minutes with John Hoffmeister, former President of Shell Oil and will be answering viewer questions for the hour.

 

 

[Jobber of the Week 0]

Aww damnit, it's so cute looking though. I was hoping it was at least something I could use on a quick run somewhere.

[EricMM 0]

Yeah, thats the limitations of electric cars.

 

There's NO middleground between the electric sportscar and the electric golfcart...

[Art Sandusky 0]

What's wrong with the Tesla?

First, only one has actually been delivered to a paying customer, but he has extreme limitations on what he can do with it. A purely electric drivetrain produces insane torque with the high performance specifications that the car has. This means a real transmission that can handle it and allow a driver to go above 60 and stuff like that is hard as fuck to build. It's been in the works for years now, has a showroom and others on the way, and costs a shit-ton of coin. Just read this:

 

http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/category/...la-birth-watch/

 

Its called a Peapod. Its top speed is a whopping 25 mph. Its nothing more than a golfcart on steroids.

Most concept cars are lucky to be able to propel themselves. It would obviously be marketed to city dwellers, not suburbanites or rural areas.

http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/between-t...e-announcement/

[Jobber of the Week 0]

It's a NEV. There's a whole class of cars like that. You can only drive them on certain streets depending on the speed limit, so unless you live in Celebration FL it's a pain.

[Guest Vitamin X]

Yeah it seems like NEV vehicke would be pointless for a lot of people; the only advantage I would have in using a car is 1. To take it on to the interstate/freeway and 2. To have an expanded range and 3. To haul shit around, which I can do only to a certain extent on my bike. Hell, I can probably go faster than that 25 MPH on my bike, and probably have about the same range, and I don't need 6-8 hours to recharge, either.

[Perfxion 0]

The biggest problem from electric cars is the fact that they would make terrible daily drivers. Its hard to find a correct way to spec the torque so not to destroy transmissions faster than a hemi does on a dodge. Then there is the whole price tag issue. Tesla Roadsters are sweet but how many people have 120,000 just laying around. And don't even think of mentioning the Chevy Volt. That concept car has been in production/R&D since the early 1990s and its the Chinese Democracy of GM.

 

Dodge is going down the shitter because everything they have only sales with the world HEMI or SRT attached and yet those gas gusslers are fast but the muscle market is shrinking. If gas was 2.xx or lower I would trade in my 287 Grand Cherokee for a HEMI or SRT8 model in a heartbeat..

 

The only idea I can think of to make a car that can work between 60 to 120 MPH is for a LARGE torque converter to be able to take the stress. But that would be half the fucking engine for it to work. And even then, I just don't think it could truly work.

[haws bah gawd 0]

All it took was for our local news (Aiken, SC-Augusta, GA area) to mention that about 66% of the refineries in the Gulf are working, and everyone went crazy here yesterday. There were lines stretched out in the highways with people once again panicking over a "gas shortage". I watched a guy fill about 4, 5-gallon plastic jugs, then fill his car.

 

I spoke with an employee at a gas station yesterday and she brought up an interesting point. She said, "For months, people haven't been able to "afford" to fill up their vehicles. They can only afford $15-20 at a time and all this. Then word of a shortage or whatever hits, and people all of a sudden, have all this disposable income to fill every vehicle and gas jug they own".

[Perfxion 0]

If you think it was bad there, picture 4 million people around the Houston area doing that for 2 weeks now. At one point, there were 2+ hour waits to get gas.

[MarvinisaLunatic 0]

I could have paid $3.29 yesterday for gas in Harrington DE.

 

But I bought gas in MD before leaving for DE and paid $3.49 for Midgrade because it was only 4 cents more expensive than Regular, even though there was no logical reason to buy the midgrade other than it seemed like a deal considering everywhere else midgrade is about $3.70

 

And Im officially saving money for a Chevy Volt. 40 miles on electric only is almost a weeks worth of driving to and from work for me (14.8 miles x 3 days = 44.6 miles).

[EricMM 0]

But I bought gas in MD before leaving for DE and paid $3.49 for Midgrade because it was only 4 cents more expensive than Regular, even though there was no logical reason to buy the midgrade other than it seemed like a deal considering everywhere else midgrade is about $3.70

Scanners head explode picture here

[Perfxion 0]

Higher Octane improves the engine by burning off the gunk from either:

 

a - stop and go city traffic/congested highways.

 

b - continual purchase of less quality gas.

 

c - engines that have been set idle for weeks to months and having a build up of the crap in gas that breaks down after 25 to 40 days(depending on the amount of ethanol in the tank).

[MarvinisaLunatic 0]

I always buy Exxon gas just because I have two Exxon stations on Rt 50 to and from work (one each way) and they are usually the cheapest places to get gas anywhere close. I wouldnt consider it low quality gas. A and C don't apply to me either. So yes, there was no logical reason for me to buy the midgrade other than I felt like I got a deal. Now regular is $3.39 and I wouldn't get the midgrade for a 10 cent premium.

 

But anyway..

[fazzle 0]

Still $3.70-$3.75 here. Not used to being above the national average.

[SuperJerk 0]

$3.19.

 

Thanks, national economic crisis!

[At Home 0]