The 65 mpg Ford the U.S. Can't Have

[IAMX 3,055]

Wow did I ever #### up that last post.

That's what I get for multitasking.

[Ban Hammer 13,340]

In our data center we have, on average, 2 hard drive failures every year.

How many HD's?

I've owned over a dozen HD's, given some out to friends, and none ever lasted under 5 years. One even lasted 8 years before I got rid of it. Not a single failure. HD's are certainly reliable, and so far BEV's have been similar to that. As mentioned though the biggest problem is the battery cost and disposal. Lifetime shouldn't be a problem, and as BEV's continue to roll out, so will at-home charging kits.

I don't know if this is supposed to give your argument weight or not....

I don't know where AJ works, but since it's a Data Center, I'm going to guess that he is surrounded by storage arrays that have 6-12 hard drives EACH.

As for myself, I have that many hard drives between all of our computers here (The one Mags is using has 4 hard drives, mine has 3 - the main server has 6, and the other server has 4)

Forgetting all that, however, let me tell you about how dependable hard drives are.

I worked at HP for a year as a repair guy - standing on an assembly line, fixing the shiny, new, BROKEN HP computers as they came down the line. The number 2 failure (not including destroyed motherboards or CPUs with smashed pins) behind memory was hard drive death.

The worst hard drives known to man are Samsung, followed by Hitachi/IBM (we're talking desktop IDE/SATA HDDs). Maxtor has a tendency to either work or not work. If it lives past the burn-in time, it'll be fine. Probably 25% don't make it past burn-in. Seagate makes pretty good hard drives, especially SCSI ones. Western Digital makes the best PC HDDs, IMO.

Anyway.... In a typical shift, I would replace 10 hard drives that were DOA or DDRI (Died During Run-In). Figure that my line would assemble 400 computers in a shift, and the other repair guy on the other side of the line was getting as many bad HDDs as I was, and you have 20/400 bad HDDs. That's 5% dying within 2 hours of installation.

I have no idea where this was going, or why. I just remember that I giggled a bit when I saw "I've owned over a dozen hard drives!". I have 2 SCSI arrays in my basement (not connected to anything) that have 10 SCSI HDDs each. The drives are over 10 years old, and they work fine. I am not, however, going to extrapolate from that that all HDDs last a long time.

platy, add quantum to that list of crappy hard drives

[jundp 191]

Sorry..... geek porn. Got carried away there....

Sir, take your hands off your joystick.

I'd rather fondle a TB array than a joystick.....

It's like my house when P gets talking. It really is a foreign language to me.....

In the UK I used to drive a little car, a peugeot Diesel I think it was the 409 (Shockingly, I went through a period of using red diesel!)

Over here I have a BMW 5 series, but I mostly cycle everywhere.

elitist!

(i used to own a bmw....)

i work at general motors and even the cars we ship to canada get better gas mileage then the american cars. i about crapped when i saw the sticker in the window and they were getting like 49 miles per gallon.

Well, in spite of whining about high gas prices, Americans are not really interested in buying smaller, fuel efficient cars anyway.

Plus, temperatures are falling into the 40 at night here now and I already see people let their cars idle when they step out to get coffee in the morning!

I would give anything for a Smartcar. Sadly, it's not big enough for our whole family and the Smart for 4 isn't available here.

btw, isn't bio-diesel much much much cheaper in Europe?

[akdiver 3]

We have two vehicles, both of which we bought brand new (not something I would normally do, but this was special circumstances, just bear with me on that one).

One is a 2007 Chevy Aveo 5 SV. It was touted as the cheapest car in America. We paid $8000 for it, out the door. Its gas mileage sucks, at 25MPG (maybe), but it is half the price of the Yaris and Fit. That's a big difference! We can burn through a whole lot of gas for that kind of money. Now, this is a "town car". It gets used in town, go to work, go home, go to the store, go home, etc. It gets very little mileage. In December, we will have had it for 2 years, and at the rate we're going, it will have MAYBE 12,000 miles on it. That's 6,000 miles/year. Very little mileage, yet daily use.

The second one is a 2007 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited. This was not cheap, at $31K out the door, but it's what I wanted as my replacement for the 1991 Trooper that I had been driving for 14 years. The gas mileage on this thing SUCKS. In town, I regularly get 12, maybe 13MPG. On the highway, its closer to 20 or 21MPG. We need this vehicle, or something like it, as our "hauler", our "adventure car", our "out of town" car. It brings the stuff home from the Home Depot, it hauls the trailer of ####### to the dump, it hauls all the camping stuff and dog when we go out and about, it hauls the SCUBA stuff when we go diving. It's also our guarantee that we can get out and about when we get two feet of snow (Alaska). It does the things the Aveo simply can't do, AND if we didn't have this vehicle, the Aveo would not cut the mustard - we would have to have a bigger, beefier, roomier vehicle. In January, we will have had this vehicle for 2 years, and I expect it will have maybe 25,000 miles on it, although 5,000 miles of that was driving it home from where I bought it in Virginia. For, for reality purposes, it will have gained 20,000 miles in 2 years of use, or about 10,000 miles per year. More than the Aveo to be sure - because it is what we use to make out of town trips - but still a LOT less mileage than many people are putting on their vehicles (think commuters).

All things considered - Ford's 65MPG vehicle would really only be of interest to us if the price is right - less than $10,000 to be sure - and even then, only in many years, after the Aveo is burned up and no longer viable. Otherwise, no matter HOW many MPGs it gets, given our use for the Aveo and the miniscule amount of mileage our "town car" gets in a year, it makes no sense to buy anything other than another disposably-priced Aveo 5 SV.

Edited September 10, 2008 by akdiver

[Ban Hammer 13,340]

In the UK I used to drive a little car, a peugeot Diesel I think it was the 409 (Shockingly, I went through a period of using red diesel!)

Over here I have a BMW 5 series, but I mostly cycle everywhere.

elitist!

(i used to own a bmw....)

that explains a lot too!