Bill Roper's Journal

This is not an immediate problem, but it is a problem that I may have a year plus from now, so naturally, I am choosing to worry about it now.

In May 2025, if everything goes according to plan, K will graduate from high school and will start college. At that point, it may be really helpful if she has access to her own car, depending on where she is going to college, which is something that is still on the list of things that we don't know about.

Now, if K needs a car, I could buy her a used car. Or I could pass her my Ford Edge, which will be about seven years old with low mileage and which (as my dad used to say) will surround the child with plenty of steel.

At which point I could buy myself a new car. (Aha!) All things being equal, what I'd really like to buy is a hybrid Ford Edge. But by that time, there will still not be a hybrid Ford Edge. In fact, it looks like there will not be a Ford Edge at all, as the model is supposed to be discontinued. Exactly why Ford is doing this is unclear, as the number of Edges that I see on the road in the Chicago area is huge. But here we are.

So what I'd like to have is a small hybrid SUV with no moonroof (because I don't fit in cars with a moonroof) which is bigger than a Ford Escape, because the Escape will not hold enough cargo and passengers once a guitar is involved. Right now, the contender would be a hybrid Toyota Highlander.

But maybe there's something I haven't found yet.

Or maybe there will be something in 2025. Who knows?

The only thing that is certain is that this discussion will make Gretchen crazy.

We are hoping to get the minivan back from the body shop this week. In the meantime, we keep shuffling around with the single car. Today, this meant that Gretchen and I went out for lunch. Then I dropped her off for her PT appointment, went home, picked up K, dropped her off for driving lessons, went back and picked up Gretchen from PT, and then went back home to work.

Normally, Gretchen would be doing the majority of this driving. I am developing increasing sympathy for her complaints of spending all of her time in the car...

I had hopes of getting the van back tomorrow, but, unless we get a call early in the morning, that won't be happening. Of course, an early morning call remains possible and we are prepared to drop everything and drive south to recover the van. We'll see.

I had plans to take the Edge in to take care of a couple of minor recalls right after Marcon, but that hasn't happened since it has been the only car and you don't take the only car to the shop for recalls unless the car is massively unsafe when you don't do them. When I get the van back, this is going to get taken care of.

Meanwhile, today some spammer decided to forge my email address as the source of his bogus Netflix email with the result that I got all of the bounce messages from the addresses that no longer worked, along with three angry emails from people who didn't realize that spammers forge email addresses in the headers. Oh, joy.

Ah, well. Let's see what happens tomorrow.

Maybe I'll get a call to come pick up the van. :)

It turns out that I can look at my daily energy usage from ComEd with my smartphone. What I see when I look at that is that my energy usage has gone up by around $3 / day starting a week ago yesterday, which is (by no coincidence) when the new plug-in hybrid van arrived at the house and started being plugged in to recharge.

So for about the current cost of a gallon of gas each day, we're getting a hypothetical 31 miles of electric range. Overall, this is a good thing.

Gretchen got to drive the new van today and is getting used to it.

On the other hand, I have *got* to get the other side of the garage cleaned out, because parking a minivan in front of the steps down into the garage turns out not to be our best choice. Things are just a *bit* tight.

I will see how much cooperation I can get this weekend.

Today, we will explain why Bill and Gretchen failed in their attempt to buy a new minivan this evening.

The current minivan contenders are the Toyota Sienna and the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid. Both of these are hybrids, but the latter is a plug-in hybrid, which qualifies it for a $7500 Federal tax credit. In what is almost certainly not a coincidence, that is almost exactly the price difference between the hybrid and non-hybrid models.

Aside from the Sienna not qualifying for a tax credit and not being able to soak up electrons from a wall socket, there is also the problem that everything except the base trim line is ordered with a sunroof. There are some options on the mid-line trim that I would be willing to pay for, but since I do not actually fit in a van with a sunroof (all of my height being in my torso), I cannot get them in a minivan that I can drive in any sensible fashion.

This is not totally disqualifying when looking for a Sienna. The fact that none are actually available, however, is more of a problem.

The Pacifica Hybrid's lowest trim line is actually one trim line up from the bottom for the Pacifica line, so it has the features that I generally want and it is possible to find these without a sunroof. Also, dealers have Pacifica Hybrids in stock.

There is a dealer not too far from our home whose name rhymes with "Stapleton" that has, in the past, advertised some decent discounts on minivans. That's where I went for a test drive two years ago, early in pandemic season. Sadly, Gretchen was not ready to buy a new minivan then, so we didn't. But I periodically poke their website to see what's happening there.

When I poked their website a few days ago, they were advertising new Pacifica Hybrid minivans at an "ePrice" that was a bit less than 10% off MSRP. In the current environment, that's a good looking price, as the best I've seen anywhere else is about 5% off MSRP. A lot of the dealers aren't discounting at all or are discounting by the amount of the $750 Chrysler financing rebate.

After discussing this with Gretchen this afternoon and doing some research, we decided to see if it was time to buy a new minivan. TLDR; no, apparently not.

I sent a request for today's price to the dealership and got a call back from a nice young woman who confirmed that the only rebate included in the quoted price was the $750 Chrysler financing rebate. Having determined that, I made an appointment for Gretchen and I to go in for a test drive this evening.

The fellow who was helping us at the dealership was not the person who we'd booked an appointment with, but he was a nice enough guy. It turned out that they had at least one more Pacifica Hybrid that was available in a different color at $300 / $600 more than the gray and black vans on the website. We did a test drive around the lot with the gray van, which handled well. (We could have driven further, but Gretchen did not want to leave the lot in an unfamiliar neighborhood at night, which I sympathize with.)

Back in we went to discuss terms. I explained that if the third minivan cost $300 more than the other, I would be willing to pay that for the color that we liked better, but otherwise, we could just get one of the others. He said that shouldn't be a problem.

And then he came back with paperwork which instead of including a discount -- or even the $750 Chrysler financing rebate -- had a market adjustment upward of $10,000 in price. We were also getting slightly low-balled on the trade-in of the old van, although maybe not by a lot.

I then pulled out the piece of paper from my pocket with the information that I had carefully copied from the website that indicated that they were discounting these vans, not marking them up. Fun and games followed.

I signed a more-or-less offer to buy a minivan for the advertised price. He took it in and the next "manager" came out and started explaining about market scarcity and such.

I asked for my key back and we left to get dinner.

When we got home, there was a message on my answering machine asking me to call back. I got a fellow who explained how we didn't qualify for the ePrice on line, even though the woman that I had spoken to when making the appointment had said that we did. And these vans are in short supply.

I suggested that he should sell the van to someone who needed to buy a van today. I also noted that this made me feel better about not buying the van two years ago for the excellent on-line price, because I apparently wouldn't have gotten it at that price then either.

And that was that.

So Bill and Gretchen have yet to buy a new van.

On the other hand, since we cleaned out the van before going to the dealership, the interior is now in much better shape. :)

Got up early today for softball practice. The second half was a scrimmage with one of the other local teams, which was a good learning experience for everyone.

Ordered a new garbage disposal from Home Depot. Went to pick it up and discovered that they had canceled the order, because it was out of stock. They had called the home phone while I was out to tell us this instead of sending an email; then when I went to check status on the email it said that *I* had canceled the order. I suggested -- in my capacity as a customer and a professional programmer -- that the UI for this left something to be desired. I went to check and there were none of this disposal on the shelf, so I ended up buying a more expensive one after determining that I wasn't about to get one cheaper anywhere else. Ah, well.

Yesterday, I checked online and found that the minivan that I have been stalking is back on sale again, the rebates having returned. Gretchen still isn't up for replacing the current minivan, so this was simply a matter of keeping current. In a no-doubt totally unrelated event, last night I dreamed that our current minivan had broken down and was venting steam through the *roof*.

The batteries in the children have completely worn out and they are both asleep as far as I can tell.

Must be time to go to bed. :)

Today, Gretchen and I got complete physicals, which we have not had in a while. I'm heading back tomorrow, as they want to run a quick ultrasound to check something and the folks who do that will be there, so best to get it taken care of ASAP.

This afternoon, I went out to take a look at the new Toyota Sienna. The current minivan is getting a little long in the tooth and it's time to be doing my research. Part of this was getting some measurements that you just can't get on any known website, so I took a tape measure along with me. It turns out that in standard position, it is 56 inches from the back of the second seat to the end of the loadable area in the cargo hold. This is an important number to know, because the van is very, very full when the whole dealer table and family are off for a trip. A smaller space would be problematic.

The space behind the second seats in the current van is 53 inches. I believe that will pass. :)

The Sienna drove well in a brief test drive. Sadly, *every* trim line above the base comes with a standard moonroof which takes enough headroom that I would end up with my head in the ceiling. So no fancy options for us if we're in a Sienna.

And these are things I needed to know.

I went out to my car to go get lunch and discovered that the left rear tire was completely flat. Apparently, I picked up a railroad spike and the tire is completely unrepairable.

So now I am getting a new tire.

Oh, joy.

The entertaining thing about parking the new car is -- not surprisingly! -- figuring out how to get it in and out of the garage. The Edge is built on the same basic platform as the Fusion; it's just a good bit taller. And the Fusion is a smaller car than the old Five Hundred. So it is actually a bit easier to get in and out of the garage, or at least it will be once I get used to exactly where the fenders are.

At the moment, my objective is not to scrape anything. :)

There's also a problem with the garage itself, as the mark on the floor that I use to gauge when I'm far enough into the garage to stop is currently obscured by junk. The solution to that is to clean up the junk. If we can clean up all of the junk, Gretchen can park her car in the garage again.

There is, however, a lot of junk to clean up.