This past weekend our primary vehicle had major technical issues, leaving us stranded for the weekend until Monday morning when the rental car place near us opened up shop. Being stuck without wheels got my wheels turning. Realizing how car-centered our world has become, I began to notice the distances between our apartment and every thing we normally drive to during the week. Luckily, my work was a short 10 minute bike ride away, making me feel rather guilty for not biking it more often keep a little less mess out of the air.
Houses caught my attention as well. The car has become the focus of the modern home design. Our garages face the street. We come home, drive into our mini house for the car and walk from that into our home. We don’t need to walk past the neighbor kids or the guy who lives next to us watering his grass. In older neighborhoods, the houses have prominent front doors and porches. If there is a garage, it is an afterthought behind the house, accessed by the alley.
To get from your garage to your home, you still have to walk through your yard and be seen by your neighbors. Our vehicles dominate the distance between home, school, work, grocery and family. And they even govern how we build our homes. Most households have one car for every legal driver and most cars on the free way carry just one driver. Some of us have better insurance on our vehicles than on ourselves. We spend more on oil changes and car repairs each year than we do in our own routine checkups and preventative care. It is all very fascinating.
And in light of that, we have purchased a new vehicle. The repairs of an older car are too costly and disruptive for a two person household with only one vehicle. We picked a Toyota Yaris 2009 3 door hatchback. Our first instinct was to go with a hybrid, but the technology is not at a place where we are willing to sing 20 thousand dollars into a vehicle at this point. Our second choice was “clean diesel” by VW. 
Their Jetta TDI gets 40+ mpg. Alas, the price tag was hefty and the 2009 models were nearly all gone. (We thought that odd since 2009 is only half over and their 2010 don’t hit the road until November at the earliest. We suspected that there were some bugs in the clean diesel model that caused them to be pulled from the production line for 2009. VW hasn’t made diesel engines from 2006-2009). The Yaris was cheap ($16,000 tripped out) and the most fuel efficient gas car in its class. It gets us from point A to point B on a low budget. When we get rich, we’ll be the first one’s line for a Tesla car though, trust me. :)
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