Solo flying practice

On Tuesday, I got in N19760 and flew out to the practice area, all by myself. It was the first time I left the airport solo, and one can’t help but wonder in that moment: Will I come back again?

I took my handheld GPS unit with me so I could track my flight path. The airplane has a small GPS display, but I wanted to collect data.

After a warm-up circuit around the pattern, I headed northwest to the Santa Fe practice area, which is less than 10 miles from the El Monte airport. You can see my path here, including the initial loop (right pattern at EMT from runway 19) and then my repeated circles and turns in the practice area. While there, I stayed north of the 210 freeway and was bounded on the west by Burbank airport’s airspace and on the east by El Monte’s airspace. Not a huge space to practice in — rather like a large parking lot!


Flight to the practice area

You can also see my eventual return, descending across the 210 for a right base approach to El Monte. I made it!

The GPS also tracks groundspeed, which is rather interesting to contemplate, since while flying the plane I am focusing on airspeed instead. Here is a plot of my groundspeed as a function of time (click to enlarge):

Ground speeds

I annotated it with what I was doing at each time. One surprise is that my initial circuit around the pattern shows a top ground speed of about 100 mph. On downwind, I am holding the plane very precisely at 80 mph (airspeed). There was an 8-knot wind from the south, so that could add ~10 mph, but I’m not sure how it got to 100!

After I reached the practice area, I leveled out at 3700 feet. You can see in this plot where I was deliberately speeding up and slowing down (while maintaining altitude, which you can’t see here). I then did some slow flight (near a stall) both straight and with shallow turns; you can see that I was down around 50-60 mph. Then I did two practice stall recoveries, which are quite evident as deep dips in speed (down to almost 40 mph) followed by speeding back up as I recovered and returned to my original altitude. Finally, I did some steep turns (45-degree bank) while maintaining my speed and altitude.

Near the end, you can see my gradual slowing down as I returned to El Monte. The speed levels out at what looks like ~60 mph, which would be rather slow for final approach, except that by this time there was a 12-knot headwind. So I was keeping the plane at 75-down-to-70 mph as I made my final approach, which concluded with one of my most satisfying landings to date!

How to lease a car (and win)

I took a little break after my failed attempt to lease a Leaf and then started looking around at other options. If an electric car wasn’t going to work for me, how about a plug-in hybrid? They’re like hybrids, but cooler: you plug the car in at night and get some initial pure-electric range that costs you zero gas.

I considered the Plug-in Prius, the Ford C-Max Energi, and the Chevy Volt. Their respective pure-electric ranges are 11, 17, and 37 miles. The Volt has the largest range, but it also costs about $6k more than the Energi, which is about $6k more than the Prius. I also had an abysmal experience when I returned to the Chevy dealership to discuss Volt numbers, although that isn’t the car’s fault.

After much consideration, I settled on the Energi. And the negotiations began.

The dealer’s first offer was to write down, on a piece of paper, the MSRP ($36,155) and then immediately subtract off $6500 in incentives. He then wrote $29,655 and wrote “Wow!” next to it. This threw me. I’d come in with data from TrueCar and was ready to haggle at least down near the average price for recent sales of this vehicle… which was about $31,000. What he was offering was lower, so there was nothing for me to do.

Ever get that feeling that you must be missing something, when it’s just a little too easy?

We therefore moved on to discussing other elements of the potential lease agreement. I asked for the residual value (estimated as 52% of MSRP, which I noted was a higher fraction than the Leaf’s 49%; maybe they expect the Energi to retain its value a bit better?). I asked for the money factor, which he punted on to give me an APR instead (3%, which translates to a money factor of 0.00125). I somewhat arbitrarily decided to pay $2000 down on a 36-month lease, which put me at $420/month. I went home to think it over.

$420/mo
The next day, I googled for any other Ford incentives for which I might qualify and found two:

  • A Conquest incentive, which is where Ford will give you $1000 off if you currently are a non-Ford car owner or lessee. The name is rather distasteful (they didn’t conquer me; I made a rational decision!) but hey, it’s $1000.
  • A student incentive, which gives $500 to current students. Hey! My perpetual student status pays off!

I went back in and asked for these incentives. And got them.

$373/mo
They didn’t have the color I wanted on the lot, but they said they could trade it and have it ready by the next day. So I went home to think about it again.

At home, I suddenly realized my tactical mistake. Because the first numbers we discussed had the incentives attached, we’d never actually negotiated the price. This is a mistake.

BOTTOM LINE: If you plan to accept a manufacturer’s rebate, don’t let the dealer add that during the negotiation. A rebate is your money from the manufacturer (not the dealer) and is deducted once the price of the vehicle has been agreed upon.

So I went back to TrueCar, and this time dug in to find out how to select my option package and deselect all of the incentives, so I could do an apples-to-apples comparison. I was a little apprehensive going back intending to negotiate more. We’d practically shaken our hands on the deal already. But nothing was signed, so it was still up for grabs.

The next day, the dealer called to say the car was ready — freshly washed, freshly charged, and with a full tank of gas.

Me: “That’s fantastic! I’ll be in this evening. And by the way — everything happened so fast yesterday that I realized we skipped an important step! We never negotiated the price.”
Him: “… Oh. Okay.”

So I went in with my TrueCar data, which pointed to an average sales price for this car with these options of $34,455, or $1700 less than what we’d discussed the day before. And I said, “I want that price.”

Him: “But that’s only $20 above invoice!” [True.] “That won’t even cover the tank of gas I put in for you.”
Me: “That’s what I want.”
Him: “How about $34,743?” [This seemingly random number came from the same TrueCar printout, which included a price they claimed they could get for you at a dealership that was signed on with TrueCar, which this one wasn’t.]

A weird feeling came over me. I REALLY REALLY wanted to say yes. This guy was super nice, he’d just knocked $1412 off the price, and how much of a jerk did I want to be?

Why did I feel like I was being a jerk?

With a supreme effort of will, I forced myself to say, “No.” And we sat there in silence for what felt like 3 million years. Finally I said, “How about halfway between, at $34,600?”

Him: “Would you feel 100% satisfied by that? And would you give me an Excellent rating in the survey?”
Me: “You care about that?”
Him: “Absolutely!”
Me: “Okay. Yes, I’d be satisfied.”
Him: “Done!”
$299/mo

The rest of the process went smooth as silk. The salesperson showed me the controls on the new car until the finance person was ready, and I then signed a bunch of papers.

The Ford staff, especially the sales manager, were great. None of them pressured me at all, and the sales manager patiently went over every single number until I was satisfied. That gave me a lot of confidence in the deal. (This was not true of other salespeople I interacted with at other dealerships. The Chevy dealership was the WORST.) Likely I could have haggled harder for this car, but I came away feeling that I got a good deal, and I didn’t have to go all nasty to get it. That made me feel good about myself, too!

Other lessons learned:

  • When leasing (at least in California), you only pay tax (use tax, not sales tax) on the amount of your lease payments, plus your down payment, plus any incentives for which the dealer is being reimbursed (e.g., by the manufacturer). The exception is for incentives paid by the federal government (like federal tax rebate for PHEVs) (not taxed) or cash rebates that the dealer is not reimbursed for (not taxed). I had to finally call the CA Board of Equalization to get a clear interpretation of this, because I couldn’t find an authoritative discussion of it online, and (to my chagrin) I found regulation 1660 extremely difficult to interpret myself.
  • You can look up the DMV registration fee yourself to confirm that you’re being charged the correct amount.
  • Plug-in electric hybrid vehicles qualify for a California rebate of $1500. Not the $2500 that pure electric vehicles get, but not bad!
  • They also qualify for California carpool lane access stickers. Still waiting for mine!

How to fail to lease a car (in practice)

In July, I did a couple of test drives with the Leaf and other electric vehicles. In early August, I settled on the Leaf as my car of choice. Not one to be rushed into a purchase before doing my research, I passed up the last day of the August window for getting a free home charging station, figuring I would come back in September if I really wanted that car.

This may have been a mistake. (Or maybe not.)

That same day (August 10), I began negotiations with Rudy, my salesperson from Nissan Duarte, for a lease price. We dickered the price a little by email, and then we agreed that he’d contact me again on September 1 with updated prices “in case anything changes.” I would then be poised to swoop in on September 3, the first day that the free charging stations would be available that month, and drive away in my Leaf.

In the meantime, I called two other local dealerships and compared prices; they were all about the same. I also belatedly realized that the $2500 CA electric vehicle rebate was rapidly exhausting its funds. Would they last until September?

Late in the month, I did a bunch of research on leases so as to be a savvy consumer and learned that the prices I’d gotten were much inflated. But now I was equipped to really negotiate.

Monday
On September 1, I failed to receive updated numbers from Rudy. So I called him on Monday, September 2. I negotiated the price down. I was excited. This was working!

“You have a car for me?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” he said. “No problem.”

“In the color I want? Blue?” I realized he’d never asked me what color.

“Yes, we’ll have it. When do you want to make your appointment for?”

Tuesday
On September 3, I woke up all psyched to be getting a new car at my 7 p.m. appointment. All was going well until 2 p.m., when I received this email from Rudy:

Hi i know your at work so i did not want to call with this important information.
I am very sorry but the sv leaf that you we were out to get has been sold by the dealership. Is there a second color option?

I called him immediately. He confirmed: they had SOLD THE CAR I HAD AN APPOINTMENT TO LEASE that day.

“It’s first-come, first-served, you know?”

No, I did not want another color. I wanted the car I’d spec’d out. I asked him to see if other dealerships in the area had it. His answer: No. There was not a single Leaf SV in blue with premium package to be had in the Los Angeles area.

I couldn’t believe it. I hung up and started calling. I called 6 dealerships in an ever-widening circle, despite knowing they must be checking the same inventory database. No. No one had that car. I was stunned. THEY SOLD MY CAR!

A couple of hours later, I get a call from Nissan Alhambra. Miguel tells me that they don’t have the car, but will be getting one that night or maybe the next morning. I quote the amount I’d negotiated with Rudy, and Miguel sputters and says that it’s way too low. So I try to call Rudy back and see if he can get that car transferred to his dealership. Rudy is “with a client” so I instead get Matt, who says, “Oh yeah, I’m the one who sold your Leaf.” Thanks, Matt.

Matt claims that Alhambra may be lying about their inventory, as he looked “30 days out” and no one is getting that particular car. I can’t figure out why he doesn’t contact them himself to find out. We go in circles until I finally say, “So, what I’m hearing is, you’re not willing to CALL Alhambra and get this car from them, if it does exist. So basically, you don’t want my business.” Matt then helpfully adds that they actually DO have the blue Leaf that I want, because someone bought it two weeks ago and just traded it in for a Sentra. But they can’t lease it to me because they can only lease new cars, not two-week-old cars.

I give up on Duarte and call Alhambra back to begin negotiating. I get Emmett, a manager. At first he tries to say something about MSRP, but I’m not having any of that and after some arm-twisting, he seems to switch out of salesperson mode and become this completely reasonable, straight-talking guy who’s a pleasure to work with. We end up at a number for the car that’s actually $500 cheaper than the price Rudy and I had reached. Unlike Rudy, he glibly itemizes the “non-tax fees” so I know exactly what’s included. Emmett tells me that Danny will call me back the next day as soon as the car comes in.

Wednesday
I hear nothing from Danny, so I call the dealership at 6 p.m. Turns out that Danny wasn’t working that day. I ask for Emmett. He’s “with a client.” I get Omar, who transfers me to Thomas, an “inventory manager,” which sounds promising. Thomas says, “We have your car! Only it’s got the charcoal interior, not the light gray. Let me do another search and call you back.” He doesn’t. I call back at 6:30. Thomas says he found a blue Leaf with gray interior but needs to consult with Emmett to make sure the MSRP matches what we’d negotiated, and he’ll call me back in 5-10 minutes.

At 7 p.m., I call Thomas back. He ruefully reports that he “made a mistake” and there is no blue/gray Leaf. But they absolutely positively will have one by 10 a.m. the next morning (“just as you’re waking up!” he adds bizarrely), and that Emmett will call me.

Thursday
I don’t get any calls so I call Emmett at 11 a.m. He’s not in the office that day but takes my call on his cell. They don’t have the Leaf I want (model SV) and in fact the blue/charcoal one Thomas mentioned to me was actually a model S. Emmett hands me off to Ron, another manager, who is in the office that day. Ron turns out to also be a very reasonable, straight guy. The bad news from Ron: There is no blue Leaf SV to be found. The nearest one is in Seattle. No one is getting one for at least the next 30 days, which means the CA rebate would undoubtedly be exhausted. Would I consider another color?

At this point I was so exhausted that I contemplated it. Silver. Would I be okay with silver? I detested the idea of pursuing a stupid quixotic quest that turned so pointedly on something as inane as the color of the vehicle. Did I really need blue? But if I got silver, would I regret it for the 36 months of the lease? Ron and I briefly discuss whether I can have the car PAINTED. Turns out, no: or at least, not without paying a fine at the end of the lease for modifying a car I don’t own.

And then a weird thing happened. See, the nearest silver Leaf SV + premium package was 55 miles away, barely within the Leaf’s range. And that one, too, had the charcoal interior, not a desirable attribute in southern CA. There was also a silver SV with the light gray interior, but it was 110 miles away, definitely not in the Leaf’s range. Yes, they could have it shipped. Shipped! It hit me like a bizarre reality check. I’d talked myself into how I could make a Leaf work, since most of my driving does fall within the vehicle’s 75-mile radius. I think. But seeing how hard it was just to get the car within reach made me rethink that. I’ve been saying all along that I wanted the Leaf even though it wasn’t really the “practical” choice… and now, did I really want to bend over backwards to get a car that wasn’t really a practical car?

No.

I didn’t.

So I said, “No, thanks,” along with a “but you’ve been so great through all of this that I *wish* I were buying a car from you,” to which Ron laughed.

And I hung up the phone.

Test-driving the Tesla

I slid into the driver’s seat of the Tesla Model S with eager anticipation. Would it live up to all the hype?

Yes.

This is a car the way cars should be. The fact that it’s also an electric car catapults it into the realm of Sublimely Awesome, but even without that it would be a thing of beauty and utility. Everything in it works. The touch screen is responsive. The user interface is simple, clean, and beautiful. The sun roof is generous, the passenger space expansive, the cargo space eyebrow-raising. The seats are comfortable, the ride is smooth. The backup camera view is cinematic. Really, there is nothing NOT to like about this car. It’s practically the Platonic ideal of a car.

Here’s the dashboard, which consists of a simple customizable display in front of the wheel and a simply IMMENSE touch screen in the center console:


You can’t imagine how huge this thing is until you sit down next to it. It’s the size of a legal pad. However, it is often used in split-screen mode (as shown here) to give you, effectively, two displays. Its response is never jumpy, just smooth. It has magical powers, like a touch slider that opens the sun roof to the percent specified and other touch buttons that let you change the suspension of the car, while driving.

Oh, speaking of driving: this car moves. At the free way on-ramp, I was warned to put both hands on the wheel, “because it takes people by surprise.” Boy, did it! You press on the accelerator and it leaves your stomach behind. I didn’t even get to floor it because we were already at the top of the ramp going 60 (zero to 60 in 4.2 seconds!) and I didn’t want to ram the cars ahead of me. I got onto the freeway and tested the acceleration from a starting point of 70 mph. Zoom! It *still* took off with the same unnaturally intense pickup (unnatural today because we don’t expect that from a car. BUT WE WILL.).

The Tesla battery design is a leap ahead of the other electric vehicles on the market. It is composed of 8000 individual lithium-ion batteries, each about the size of a AA battery. Loss of individual batteries doesn’t affect the overall performance, and Tesla (the company) constantly monitors your battery status and contacts you to bring the car in if there are failures. The batteries are liquid-cooled and therefore perform much better, especially on hot days, than other electric vehicles that use air-cooled batteries. The Model S also has a range of more than 250 miles, handily addressing range anxiety.

I still can’t bring myself to spend $62,000 (after rebates) on a car. But I’m almost persuaded that this car is actually worth it.

Electric and hybrid cars

It is time, at last, to look for a new car. For the first time in a decade, I started looking into what the current interesting automotive options are. I have many friends who own Priuses, and naturally an energy-efficient machine appeals to me. But I’ve discovered that in 2013 there is a much wider range of options beyond Toyota.

Electric cars! No longer a sci-fi fantasy or an option reserved for the super-rich, electric cars are out there on the roads today. A great starting point for learning more about the options, considerations, map of charging stations, etc., is pluginamerica.org. With that under my belt, I decided to go for some test drives.

My first stop was at the Nissan Dealership. The all-electric Leaf is comfortingly familiar (I already drive a Nissan) and really, I must say, quite charming. The visibility out the back feels a little more constrained than in my current Sentra, but this seems (puzzlingly) to be a common design feature of newer car models. Our test drive was in the top-trimline Leaf SL, featuring leather seats, with front AND rear seat heaters (!), a “Photovoltaic Solar-Panel Rear Spoiler” (a roof-mounted solar panel that provides power for your car accessories!), and the CARWINGS® phone app to let you remotely check the battery status, schedule charging, turn on the AC before you go out to the car, and other amazing stuff.

Driving the Leaf was a delight. Electric motors have more torque at lower speeds, and the vehicle’s acceleration from a stoplight was a real pleasure. (Of course, I am comparing it to my manual transmission ’99 Nissan Sentra experience.) I didn’t get to test highway-speed passing (which might not be as powerful since the electric motor has much less torque at high speeds) because the freeway was clogged with Los Angeles weekend traffic.

The dashboard interface was surprisingly simple. Left: engine temperature; right: charge and estimated range; top: are you regenerating power (braking) or consuming it (accelerating)?

The mini-dash at the top shows speed, time, and temperature, plus a cryptic icon meter on the left. This turns out to be your visual feedback about how “eco-friendly” your driving is. When you minimize braking and accelerating, a little “tree” progressively grows there, starting from a little bare trunk and then adding branches. If you finish growing one tree, it is saved on the lower right (1up!) and you start growing the next one. Apparently the number of trees you grow is stored for the lifetime of the vehicle. It is probably accessible with the CARWINGS app and coming to a social media site near you.

I was puzzled by the tree metaphor. When I asked about it, the salesperson said, “Each tree represents a tree that you saved by driving a Leaf.” I asked, “But wouldn’t it make more sense to use barrels of oil or something? Cars don’t run on trees.” Him: “No, it’s because of CO2 emissions, you know?” Because CO2 kills trees? What?

I really enjoyed the driving experience. The only thing I didn’t like was that I couldn’t seem to adjust the rear-view mirror. The salesperson advised me to adjust the height of my *seat* to make the rear-view mirror show the right field. Weird.

Here are the Leaf’s vital statistics:

Range: 75 miles
Top speed: 90 mph
Price (lowest trim): $28,800 (minus $7500 federal tax rebate) or
$199/month + $2000 down for a 3-year lease

Next I visited the Chevy dealership to try out a Volt. The Volt is not an electric car. It is a plug-in hybrid, meaning it has a small electric battery that it can run on for a while, plus a gas engine that kicks in when you run out of battery charge or you need extra acceleration or you get over 70 mph. As such, it seems to be a better practical solution than the Leaf: you get increased reliability, increased performance, increased range, but the car still burns (some) gas, and you’ll pay another $10k for it.

The Volt also felt very nice to drive, but I didn’t like it as much as the Leaf. Probably because they needed to fit a gas engine and a battery into a standard car package, they abandoned the center rear seat and instead use that space to store the battery under/in the car. That seemed fine to me. However the dashboard is a confusing barrage display with odd choices about how much real estate is given to different items.

In front of the steering wheel is something that looks like this:

Left is charge/range; middle is speed and a bunch of cluttery icons; right is the mysterious green sphere. This sphere is the equivalent of the Leaf’s growing trees, except you don’t accumulate anything. Instead you are instructed to use it as a feedback device. If the green sphere floats up, you are accelerating. If it goes down, you are braking. Your mission is to keep it in the middle, i.e., do nothing. Since I already know when I’m accelerating or braking, as I’m the one doing it, it was hard to see how this adds anything useful.

Some other green sphere that I never decoded is reproduced in the default view on the big navigation screen in the center console:

Here are the Volt’s vital statistics:

Pure electric range: 37 miles
Top speed: 100 mph
Price (lowest trim): $39,000 (minus $7500 federal tax rebate) or
$289/month + $2000 down for a 3-year lease

In summary, I liked the Leaf a lot more, but the Volt would be a more practical solution. A 75-mile range, after which you must spend 6-12 hours recharging your car (although apparently with the right charger you can get to 80% capacity in 30 minutes), would be very constraining as the only car in a household (great as a second car, though!). Nissan is offering some other nice incentives to woo the nervous customer, including free roadside assistance and several days of free (regular) car rentals for those times that the Leaf won’t suffice (roadtrips?). I also don’t know enough about how available the charging stations scattered around the city are. (On the up side, charging is free paid for by the government.)

But that’s not all! There’s more research to be done. I still want to try out the Prius as well as the new plug-in Prius, and may also sample the Honda Fit EV, the Ford Focus EV, and the Honda Civic hybrid.

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