GM’s Volt: cost-benefit analysis

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GM is claiming that its forthcoming electric car, the Volt, will do 230 mpg. Amazing, if true. But it will cost $40,000. Writing in The Atlantic, Daniel Indiviglio reported on some calculations to see how long he’d have to drive a Toyota Corolla before he’d have recouped the purchase price of the Volt.

The price difference in 2011 between the Volt and Corolla should be approximately $24,189. Next, I figured out how much it would cost to drive a mile in each car. That’s around 11.9 cents per mile for the Corolla and 1.3 cents per mile for the Volt. Thus, it’s around 10.6 cents more expensive per mile to drive the Corolla.

From this point, it’s pretty simple. Just divide the price difference by how much more per mile it costs to drive the Corolla. That tells us that you would need to drive the Volt approximately 229,000 miles before you break even for paying more to buy it.

Clearly, my methodology takes a few short cuts. Each year you drive the Volt, the price of gasoline may continue to increase. So the number would likely be a little less. For example, if you assume $4 per gallon, then you’d need to drive around 177,000 miles to break even.

There’s a little more help that Volt drivers will get — from Uncle Sam. There will be a government rebate of $7,500 available when you buy a Volt. That lowers its potential price tag to $32,500, reducing the difference in 2011 prices between the Volt and Corolla to $16,689. As a result, you would need to drive approximately 158,000 miles to break even, based on my other original assumptions.

158,000 miles is still a lot. Unless the price of gas truly skyrockets well past the $3 level after 2011, then the argument for purchasing a Volt will remain based more on environmental ethics than economics. That is unless you drive cars for a really, really long time.

Obama on healthcare reform

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Good Op-Ed piece by him in the NYT.

OUR nation is now engaged in a great debate about the future of health care in America. And over the past few weeks, much of the media attention has been focused on the loudest voices. What we haven’t heard are the voices of the millions upon millions of Americans who quietly struggle every day with a system that often works better for the health-insurance companies than it does for them.

And,

Lastly, reform will provide every American with some basic consumer protections that will finally hold insurance companies accountable. A 2007 national survey actually shows that insurance companies discriminated against more than 12 million Americans in the previous three years because they had a pre-existing illness or condition. The companies either refused to cover the person, refused to cover a specific illness or condition or charged a higher premium.

We will put an end to these practices. Our reform will prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage because of your medical history. Nor will they be allowed to drop your coverage if you get sick. They will not be able to water down your coverage when you need it most. They will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or in a lifetime. And we will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses. No one in America should go broke because they get sick.

Most important, we will require insurance companies to cover routine checkups, preventive care and screening tests like mammograms and colonoscopies. There’s no reason that we shouldn’t be catching diseases like breast cancer and prostate cancer on the front end. It makes sense, it saves lives and it can also save money.

This is what reform is about.

Attaboy!

Facebook, Friendfeed and, er, Google (of course)

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This morning’s Observer column.

Google’s page-rank search technology is good, but it’s still pretty primitive – try looking for a hotel in rural France or a plumber in any UK town. You could say that search is about 5% solved, with 3% of that down to Google. With 95% still to do, many people think the next advances will come from adding social or collaborative dimensions to pure computational algorithms.

Which is where social networking comes in…

Just what I was thinking…

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Lovely diary par by Simon Hoggart.

There are few tribes more loathsome than the American right, and their vicious use of the shortcomings in the NHS to attack Barack Obama’s attempts at health reform are a useful reminder.

I was thinking of this during a visit to my 91-year-old dad who is still in an NHS hospital after three weeks, recovering from a broken hip. He has had fantastic care, including a new metal hip, blood transfusions, different antibiotics to match every aspect of his condition; all administered by nurses who remain cheerful even when asked to perform tasks on men – the lethal combination of pain and old age makes some in the ward exceedingly grumpy – that I would not want to do for £1,000 a time. If he was in an American hospital he’d be using up half his life savings to get that standard of care, and few ordinary Americans could afford the insurance that would provide it. (This is because health insurers spend a large part of their income on PR against the ‘socialised medicine’ and on sending pro forma letters explaining why your policy doesn’t cover actual illness.) All over the US there are people whose lives are being destroyed for lack of proper health care provision, and there is no sight more odious than the rich, powerful and arrogant trying to keep it that way.

He’s right. The US ‘debate’ over healthcare reform is becoming increasingly surreal. It’s almost as though the American Right has decided that this is the way to undo what it sees as the blip of an Obama presidency.

Elsewhere the Guardian has a nice piece by an American academic who has lived in this country for many years. He points out — rightly — that the biggest difference between the two countries (and this is true not only for the UK but also for most of the big European democracies) is that fear of bankruptcy has been disconnected from the universal fear of serious illness.

The relationship between doctors and their patients at every level is different from that in the States; here money does not change hands. An American friend of mine with five children was terrified when he became unemployed, fearful that one of them might become ill. I became ill when I was briefly back in the US some years ago, attending a meeting. With an acute urinary obstruction, the first person I saw, and the only one who could admit me for treatment, was the woman in charge of payment. My credit card probably saved my life.

There may be delays, frustrations and bureaucracy with the NHS, but the system delivers outstanding healthcare at no cost to the patient and far less of the GDP that the US system consumes. Being over 60, all prescription drugs are free. Perhaps it is that absence of fear of becoming ill that is the most important aspect of the system.

It’s difficult to believe that the hysterical lobbying against universal health care that’s currently raging in the US could derail Obama’s attempts at reform. But then this is a country where 46 million people voted for McCain/Palin, and where many people think Palin would make a serious presidential candidate.

Magnitudes

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The current estimated size of the universe is 13.7 billion light-years. Given that light travels at a speed of 186,282 miles per second, how big is that?

Answer, according to WolframAlpha: 8.054×10^22 miles or 1.296×10^23 km.

Just thought you’d like to know.

No More Perks

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The Wall Street Journal recently published an interesting piece on the coffee+WiFi culture.

Amid the economic downturn, there are fewer places in New York to plug in computers. As idle workers fill coffee-shop tables — nursing a single cup, if that, and surfing the Web for hours — and as shop owners struggle to stay in business, a decade-old love affair between coffee shops and laptop-wielding customers is fading. In some places, customers just get cold looks, but in a growing number of small coffee shops, firm restrictions on laptop use have been imposed and electric outlets have been locked. The laptop backlash may predate the recession, but the recession clearly has accelerated it.

Given that free WiFi has been more of a US than a British tradition, the change bites harder over there. (In fact in the UK the only restaurant chain that consistently offers free WiFi is — amazingly — McDonalds, which is why I can sometimes be found under the golden arches with one of their — surprisingly good — black coffees while I connect to down- or up-load something urgent.)

The WSJ piece sparked a thoughful post by Joey Devilla entitled “The Tragedy of the Coffee Shop” in which he puts the coffee-shop phenomenon in a wider context. He points out that the coffee-house has played a venerable role in the evolution of democracy in many European countries.

Then, as now, they functioned as what sociologists like to call “Third Places”: places that are neither home (the “First Place”) nor work (the “Second Place”), but a place that functions a community gathering place where broader, and often more creative social interactions happen. Cafes, community centres, churches, pubs in the U.K., town squares, open-air basketball courts, the parking lots of 7-11s and hackerspaces like Toronto’s HacklabTO are all third places.

In the last decade, the WiFi-enabled coffee shop has played a small but honourable role in the evolution of computer code. The guys who wrote Delicious Library in 2006, for example, did most if not all of their software development in a Seattle cafe — but did so with the permisson of the owner.

Woodstock favourites

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Interesting idea in the NYTimes which allows readers to listen to a snatch of the big numbers from the first Woodstock festival and vote for their favourite. When I looked, Jimi Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner was way ahead.