Monthly Archives: March 2009

Tesla Motors cut the price of an electric car in half last week with the announcement of the Model S, a seven-passenger sedan. Tesla’s earlier model, the Roadster, was a two-seater that retailed for $109,000. The new hatchback sedan will go for $57,400. After deducting a $7,500 tax credit, the new car is less than half the cost of the old one.

With optional long-range batteries, the Model S will have a cruising range of 300 miles (the standard battery has a range of 160 miles). The batteries are located in the floorboards and the motor is in the rear, leaving enough room for two child seats behind the conventional backseat.

The long hood is merely cargo space, leading Tesla to say that, despite its sleek design, the Model S can compete with most SUVs for moving people and goods. After folding down the seats, you can load a bicycle or 50-inch flat-screen television. But with three rows of seats, “it’s just like a station wagon,” says Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

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Good news! You can save money by selling your car and riding transit instead. The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) says the average person can save $8,500 a year taking transit instead of owning a car.

This is based on the AAA cost-of-driving formula, which says that driving costs an average of $0.54 cents per vehicle mile. Funny how Americans only actually spend $0.39 cents a vehicle mile, at least according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The difference? The BEA uses actual costs while AAA numbers are hypothetical.

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So you can save, maybe, $6,100 a year by imposing more than $9,100 in costs on other taxpayers. Good deal!

The Antiplanner has been so busy in Washington this week that I’ve barely had time to download email, much less read your no-doubt excellent comments on the posts I wrote earlier this week. But I did read a story about high-speed rail from the San Francisco Examiner.

Apparently, California thinks that it deserves “the lion’s share” of the $8 billion in the stimulus package for high-speed rail. Of course, in Aesop’s fable, the lion ended up with all of the stuff that was in dispute.

But whoever makes the decision parcelling out high-speed stimulus funds to the states will have to confront the fact that California’s high-speed rail plan is qualitatively different from those of most other states. These qualitative differences make it quantitatively at least a dozen times more expensive, not to mention far from shovel-ready.

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