MetaFilter posts tagged with transportation and automobiles

Lee press-on car

XMLicious — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 05:16:25 -0800

The Tata Nano (pic) is a car that costs less new than the amount I've spent on gas during single car trips, recently announced to the auto market in India. The Chery QQ ^, successful , wide ly ex por ted, and recognized as the Hostage Taker's Vehicle of Choice by China Car Times, is the runner-up for the world's cheapest car but is still approximately twice as expensive. Yes indeed, the price of gas is not going to come back down. So much for my coast-to-coast road trips. Forbes magazine's The World's Cheapest Cars (javascript slideshow)

Adding up US subsidies for auto travel with and without the costs of war

salvia — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 02:02:34 -0800

In the U.S., motorists do not pay their way. The US government spends more on highways and other auto-related expenses than it receives from auto-related taxes, unlike almost every country in Europe. In a recent report [pdf], Mark Delucchi calculates automobile-related costs and revenues in three different ways and concludes the subsidy is around 20-70 cents per gallon or $24-105 billion in 2002. But what are automobile-related costs, you ask? Largely tucked away in footnotes and background papers [pdf] are his careful considerations about which expenditures to include and what portion of costs relate directly to automobile oil use, for everything from the highway patrol, to fighting brushfires, to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, to military activity in the Middle East. Don't miss Report #15, in which Delucchi and coauthor James Murphy seek to calculate: “If the U.S. transportation sector did not use oil, how much would the U.S. federal government reduce its military commitment in the Persian Gulf?” [pdf] (especially Table 15-12, which summarizes much of the paper). [previously] [originally via]

Car dealers' hype beaten by internet facts

escorter — Fri, 13 May 2005 07:46:05 -0800

After an American car company recreates its legendary 1960's Ferrari-beating race car, the first $150,000 2005 production car sells at a charity event for $400,000 over sticker price, (to a Microsoft-enriched individual, of course) and many months later, dealers are still asking up to $200,000 over sticker, or at least $150,000 over sticker. The "experts" at Edmunds say the car is selling for about $100,000 over sticker (seeing their "True Market Value" requires a few clicks from this page), and the widespread belief is that these admittedly amazing cars are virtually impossible to find and all selling for at least $100,000 over sticker. But using publicly available data, including completed eBay auctions and public documents, this non-commercial site shows the truth to be very different than the hype.

Not another anti-SUV thread.

MattD — Wed, 18 Dec 2002 16:18:51 -0800

"This car isn't meant to be an SUV, a mini-van, or a sedan" ... becuase, of course, it's a station wagon (the body type that dare not speak its name), albeit a sleek new Chrysler Pacifica, now starring in double-page spreads in your finer magazines. The Europeans have never stopped making great wagons, but its been a while since anything less apalling than the Taurus Wagon came out of Detroit or Tokyo.

boot bus

donkeysuck — Thu, 14 Nov 2002 09:11:27 -0800

last year i saw the land rover, yesterday i saw the boot bus. while it looks to be in support of a small commercial site, the bus is a 'grassroots' adventure to document and share information gathered during their endless journeys in a VW bus. feel free to share your favorite 'common-man' travel resource.

Avogadro — Thu, 30 Nov 2000 16:46:30 -0800

Mathowie's blog about living in San Francisco and mentioned his dream urban vehicle. But Matt, why not get Smart? Okay, besides the fact that it's not yet available in the U.S. (more inside...)

daveadams — Mon, 29 May 2000 22:01:34 -0800

Car-free Cities
Would you like to live in a city where everything you need is within a five-minute walk? Where you can get from one side of a city of a million people to the other in less than thirty minutes? Where the air is clean, people are healthy, children and the elderly aren't dependent on others to get where they want to go, and life is beautiful? You can have it all--just ban cars.