What was once a tenuous toe-dip into green waters for car companies looks more and more like a sea change. Manufacturers today are increasingly utilizing dual-mode drivetrains both to improve fuel economy and to make better performing cars, even as they avail themselves of the hybrid cachet to hawk them. Today, there’s a hybrid for nearly every palate and purpose.
Tag Archives: economics
Seeing past the sticker: the cheapest cars to own
Sticker prices and financing aside, figuring out which car is really the cheapest to own can be a complicated affair. You have to consider the costs of sales tax, depreciation, fuel, interest on the loan, insurance, maintenance and repair. In this article, I’ll give you the rundown on the best deals over the long haul, broken down my MSRP, total cost of ownership (TCO) and vehicle category.
Which single piece of currency is worth the most?
Daniel Webster once said, “He who tampers with the currency robs labor of its bread.” That might be true, but it hasn’t prevented governments at home and abroad from revaluating, reissuing and just generally messing with these printed portraits of presidents and potentates. Was there ever a $100,000 bill? Find out as I reveal…
Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink
How can we live on a planet overflowing with 326 million trillion gallons of water and still face shortages? Even if only about .05 percent of it is drinkable, shouldn’t there be some way to purify the rest? Actually, people all over the world convert seawater to potable water, but the process tends to be prohibitively expensive at large scales. Even so, with looming droughts, natural disasters and the large-scale redistribution of moisture threatened by climate change, the need for a solution grows more essential every day.
Phoenix and Portland plan for potable problems
Phoenix, Ariz., is a sprawling desert city with twice the population of Portland, Ore., and one-fifth its annual rainfall. The Valley of the Sun irrigates its golf courses with water channeled from the Salt, Verde and Colorado Rivers, while the City of Roses guzzles winter rains and stores the remainder in the reservoirs of the Bull Run Watershed.
What could these two cities possibly have in common? Simple. They both face seasonal water shortages if projections of population growth and climate change hold true.