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Vroom!
Some of you may not have seen this on Facebook/twitter, but after much discussion and thinking about moving, etc, we bought a car - a 2005 Toyota Prius - in white.
We've done 400kms since thursday on it. The novelty of having a car is still new. It's got 4.9L/100KM (48mpg) so far, so my daily commute of 33.2km will use ~1.6L of fuel, which at current rates is $1.82 per day.. so 21 days work per month makes it $38.26 .. plus $70 for a parking pass... and.. wait for it.. $370/*month* for insurance and registration (to be reduced to ~$230 when I get some paperwork from SGIO).
Before I go on about the car.. let me rant about the insurance/rego some more. BC has this company called ICBC. It's government owned, but run as a corporation with an independent board of directors, so no ministerial oversight. Nice work if you can get it huh? They do all driver licensing, car registration and compulsory third-party insurance, and make ~$400 million profit per year. Yeah, thanks. Cost of doing business right?
Anyway, back to the car. It used to belong to Telus, which means I have a safe in the back of it (I guess they used it for laptops?) and a Telus branded first aid kit. It also had a lot of stone chips on the paintwork, a broken cargo net, and 143k KMs (89k miles) on the clock. All of this combined to make it the cheapest Prius I've seen for sale in Vancouver in the last 3 months - $9900.
So far we've added the obligatory Apple logo sticker, repaired the cargo net (with some nifty black plastic S-hooks), touched up the paint chips with some Toyota matching paint, and bought a new tail light assembly for it off eBay.
Why a new taillight assembly you may ask? Well, I misjudged the location of a pillar while reversing into our parking stall here at the apartment block. Ewps. Mister Sheen Magic Eraser got the blue paint off the bumper, though some scratches remain, and there's a small amount of panel damage that I'll probably need to get professionally fixed, but once we get the new taillight installed, it'll look good enough ;)
Anyway, back to how we've racked up 400KMs so far. I picked Elizabeth up from a write-in, saving her well over an hour of public transport, we went to North Vancouver and had delicious curry veggie pizza, we went to Finn Slough, went to Steveston, did some exploring of Richmond (found a street with almost every major religion/belief system of the area representing - Sikhism, Buddism, Christianity, Islam, Vedic..), and did our shopping.
We've done 400kms since thursday on it. The novelty of having a car is still new. It's got 4.9L/100KM (48mpg) so far, so my daily commute of 33.2km will use ~1.6L of fuel, which at current rates is $1.82 per day.. so 21 days work per month makes it $38.26 .. plus $70 for a parking pass... and.. wait for it.. $370/*month* for insurance and registration (to be reduced to ~$230 when I get some paperwork from SGIO).
Before I go on about the car.. let me rant about the insurance/rego some more. BC has this company called ICBC. It's government owned, but run as a corporation with an independent board of directors, so no ministerial oversight. Nice work if you can get it huh? They do all driver licensing, car registration and compulsory third-party insurance, and make ~$400 million profit per year. Yeah, thanks. Cost of doing business right?
Anyway, back to the car. It used to belong to Telus, which means I have a safe in the back of it (I guess they used it for laptops?) and a Telus branded first aid kit. It also had a lot of stone chips on the paintwork, a broken cargo net, and 143k KMs (89k miles) on the clock. All of this combined to make it the cheapest Prius I've seen for sale in Vancouver in the last 3 months - $9900.
So far we've added the obligatory Apple logo sticker, repaired the cargo net (with some nifty black plastic S-hooks), touched up the paint chips with some Toyota matching paint, and bought a new tail light assembly for it off eBay.
Why a new taillight assembly you may ask? Well, I misjudged the location of a pillar while reversing into our parking stall here at the apartment block. Ewps. Mister Sheen Magic Eraser got the blue paint off the bumper, though some scratches remain, and there's a small amount of panel damage that I'll probably need to get professionally fixed, but once we get the new taillight installed, it'll look good enough ;)
Anyway, back to how we've racked up 400KMs so far. I picked Elizabeth up from a write-in, saving her well over an hour of public transport, we went to North Vancouver and had delicious curry veggie pizza, we went to Finn Slough, went to Steveston, did some exploring of Richmond (found a street with almost every major religion/belief system of the area representing - Sikhism, Buddism, Christianity, Islam, Vedic..), and did our shopping.
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tbqh I don't know that we can make Vancouver given the places Chas would like to visit but I am pretty sure we will make Portand for chocolate mousse if you guys wanted to come back down. Eh, we can talk about it closer to the time once Chas has his passport, we get the flights re-done and things get a little firmer.
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So what's the pickup like? When I took my Mum's Peugeot up to Carnarvon recently, I had that running at 4.6L/100Km. As a turbo diesel, it's a bit hit & miss with the power, sometimes good, sometimes gutless.
Don't even want to think about that insurance you're paying. Damn that's scary!