Payoff

OK, as promised I have whipped up my little payoff calculator into a usable form for web consumption. I decided that I hate having to work with Java applets for silly little web things like this (larger stuff is still cool) so I ported it to JavaScript and you can just see it below. Basically, the idea I started with was to see if you would ever pay off the difference between a "normal" car (eg. Corolla) and a very fuel efficient car (eg. Prius). Then I naturally wanted to know how long that would take. So I made this and it does not only the simple calculation, but also a little more by calculating how many months of free gas you could buy for the "normal" car if you invested the money you saved buying it at 5%, compounded monthly, which I'm told is a normal simple money market investment. Thanks to Kim for help on that latter part. Enjoy!

Payoff Calculator

Name: City MPG: Highway MPG: MSRP:

Name: City MPG: Highway MPG: MSRP:

Gas price per gallon:	$
Sales tax factor:
Miles driven per year:

Round Two Results

So a long weekend and a little laziness got in the way of me and this post, but at last I have results from round two of my driving experiment. As you may recall, in round one I drove for fuel efficiency above pretty much all else and achieved a solid 28MPG on my mostly-highway route. Then, I set out to drive for the worst mileage I could get. I think I pulled it off, too! I drove at 80 MPH on the highways, gunned it off the line, pretty much never coasted, broke hard, and all kinds of other bad habits. My route was pretty much the same: - One way trip from Vista to Burbank (highway) - Three commutes (city) - Nearly an entire round trip from Burbank to San Clemente (highway) - Miscellaneous city driving around San Clemente and Burbank (city) In the end I made it 318 miles on 11 gallons. Simple division tells us that's 28.9 MPG. Wait a second! How is it higher mileage than when I tried to drive for fuel efficiency? Well, I don't know. I guess I drove a little further down to San Clemente than to Laguna Niguel, but I didn't make it all the way back before having to fill up, so that should be largely mitigated. There could have been some minor discrepancy between the traffic conditions on the freeway (this is LA after all) that led to more cruising this time around. In all, that could really only be a couple of MPG, which would mean that the maximum spread is about one MPG. It's been kind of a bummer, but I'm still going forward with round three. I'll just drive normally this time around and see how it goes. Since it took me so long to post this, I'm already half way through the tank and, well, the results look similar to the first two rounds. I guess we'll see, probably by Friday if I actually get around to posting. Over the weekend, I whipped up a little Java app to do some calculations for me. Last night I turned it into an applet. In some form, I hope to bring it here in the very near term. Look forward to a little calculator tool very soon!

Scratch (still) Rules

On Sunday night I was showing Scratch off to my girlfriend and it kind of spun into the making of a little game. It took about an hour, but all in all it's pretty great what kinds of creativity you can express in Scratch. We sat and, while implementing ideas, came up with new ideas and saw them working in the game in just a minute or two. As a reminder, all my Scratch projects are here. My gas gauge is dropping rapidly and I'll probably have results from round two of my driving style experimentation tomorrow. Stay tuned!

I Drove Green!

So I was thinking about what kind of mileage I get in my own car (a 2002 Daewoo Nubira sedan) and realized I basically didn't know, but suspected it was lower than I should be getting. So I decided to start a series of three tests to gauge my gas usage. Last Wednesday morning, I filled up my tank and hit the tripometer. Then I started mentally recording where I drove: - Three commutes (city) - One trip to Ralph's (city) - Round trip from Burbank to Laguna Niguel (highway) - Miscellaneous driving around Laguna Niguel (city) - One way trip from Burbank to Vista (highway) City: 6%. Highway: 94% (with serious traffic for probably half the highway trips). I forced myself to drive the whole thing with slow takeoffs, maximized coasting, and other good fuel economy driving practices. Further, as much as it hurt me, I limited my freeway speed to 70 MPH. All in all it was an even 294 miles and it took me 10.5 gallons of gas to fill 'er back up. Some simple division tells us that's 28 MPG. Since the EPA estimate says my car's supposed to get 22 MPG city and 31 MPG highway, I say that's pretty damn good. Next up, I'm driving like a bat out of hell to get the worst mileage I can while still feeling safe. This week I'm at 80 MPH, gunning it off the line, and throwing the brake pedal to the wind. I'll probably have the next report pretty soon at that rate. :)

This Isn't Just About Cars

So I'm a computer programmer, specifically for multimedia and games. Lately, I've been interested in some edutainment to teach kids to code. I think it teaches good logic skills and provides a good solid foundation on how to build things. This applies to all kinds of engineering, inventiveness, computer systems that pretty much everyone will be using by the time the kids grow up, and just general life. I made a little simple language a la Logo, but then yesterday I discovered, via Slashdot, an MIT program called Scratch. You use these jigsaw puzzle pieces of code to put together a little visual program to control actors on a stage. You start off with a cat actor and can make it move around, rotate, animate, turn colors, and all kinds of other stuff. You can add more actors, do all kinds of logic, and generally make a cool, artistic, multimedia little app. Once you're done, hit the Share button and your project is instantly posted to MIT's site for Scratch projects. Here are mine. OK, none are fancy or anything, but all took me way under five minutes, make sense, and were a blast to make. You should all make some little apps and then post them here in comments. C'mon. Go. :)

Ultimate Alternative Fuels Summary

This is the ultimate summary of alternative fuels, for those of you confused about the difference between ethanol, CNG, biodiesel, etc.

Mileage Estimates Are Stupid

I've always known that the EPA mileage estimates for cars was bad, but now I know that they are really bad. Holy crap, look at the pictures of their testing facility! Aerodynamics? Turning? Road surface not being perfectly smooth? How about actually just moving the vehicle? Wow. Here's an article on how they're changing it. Here's a site that shows lots of information on mileage and environmental impact, as well as some stats on, say, passenger and cargo volume, as far back as 1985.

Gas Adjusted MSRP

I made this in a spreadsheet a while ago after thinking about the cost of gas. I wondered what the actual impact of higher and lower gas mileage would be over the lifetime of a car, so I found a site (some big one, like edmunds.com) with some mileage information in a nice little table for me to copy and paste into a spreadsheet. From there, I did a little work with equations to go ahead and simply calculate out the extra cost to drive the car over the best mileage car out there 16016 miles per year (that's about how much I figure I drive) at the current price of $3.50 per gallon at the car's average gas mileage. Then I highlighted the best of each column green and the worst of each column red. Lastly, I made a chart. Now for a little analysis. The Prius obviously gets the best gas mileage and therefore sets the standard by which the best are judged. Were gas extremely expensive ($100!), the Prius would obviously be the cheapest in the 5 and 10 year terms (usual ownership lengths, I figure). However, it starts higher than some cars, so will it be cheapest in the 5 and 10? Actually, this data says "no", even in the 10. At $3.50, it's still better to go sub-compact if you're really in it for the cheapest car out there (the Yaris, it turns out). Then comes the part where I go all apples-to-oranges and start doing mid-size and (what the site I got the data from calls) "near-luxury". After all, we're interested in economics here, not features, status symbols, performance, or any of that other stuff. So we look at those and get to see just how the mileage goes down from compact to mid-size and then again to near-luxury. Also, we see the obvious price rise. :) Enjoy the data. PS: If anyone wants, I can provide the spreadsheet. Anyone know of a good way to post non-image files on Blogger (or somewhere else for free)? PPS: Tax credits can be found straight from the horse's mouth

Raw Data

Oh man, it's the chart!

Obligatory First Post

Hi, I'm Jackson. I've finally decided to create a blog because I feel like I need somewhere to post all the random crap I look up, find interesting, and tell to only a few people. Hopefully this will prove to be a place to make quick posts about things I've found, house rants, and generally be totally off-topic by the virtue of having no formal topic. For now though, I plan on posting some things I've looked up about cars as I've done a good deal of research into them recently. Now off to do two or three posts...