Never buy a car in its first model year.

When I was growing up in Ponca City, Oklahoma, American automakers were about the whole game and they brought out radical revisions of their cars about this time each year. Most of my male classmates could tell you the exact model year for any passing American car on the road. The automaker's wholesale embrace of "planned obsolescence" changed manufacturing engineering permanently, although the annual cycle dissipated somewhat after the first OPEC oil crisis hit. [As an MIT professor pointed out on national radio that year, the most important thing to understand that it takes more energy to manufacture a car than that car will use in its lifetime. Therefore, it never makes energy sense to scrap a car to get a better mileage.] Dad's point was that when they redesign the essential features of a car (ignition, drive train, etc., not simply the size of the tailfins), there are many things that can go wrong, and sometimes disastrously so. The Ford Pinto gas tank is a classic case to most of my generation, though it postdates my father's advise on the subject. For the second time in the current century I have decided to ignore my father's advice. So in April Karen Kay and I drove to Virginia to pick up my new plug-in Prius hybrid car. Like my 2001 Prius, as a first-adopter I had to order the car on the web and then wait for the car to be be built and delivered. And like that earlier Prius, Toyota's strategy clearly seems to be to have a small group of first year buyers discover what couldn't be found in earlier testing. Thus, this year they only allowed dealers in twelve states to get the cars; hence, the trip to Virginia. The 2001 Prius definitely had its problems. The NiMH batteries for the electric motor would suck energy from the lead-acid battery used for the accessories and gas engine, thus resulting in the need to get a jump for its (golf-cart sized) lead acid battery. And Karen Kay had to use the warranty coverage to get a computer replacement in the car on a trip to Austin, Texas. The original Prius is still with us, has over 125,000 miles on the odometer, and finally had to have the battery replaced ($4000+). But, with that and other maintenance, it is probably good for another 125,000 miles. The new one has behaved itself well to date. We are about 500 miles form home on a 2500-mile journey to Cape Cod. The 2001 Prius mileage averaged in the low forties, this one is holding steady at about 53 mpg (as a hybrid). I say "as a hybrid" because at home I plug it in at night and do most of my day's driving around town on electricity. My roundtrip commute is slightly more than the roughly 15 miles I can get in EV (electric vehicle) mode, but I average over 100 mpg in both July and August (when we made no long out-of-town trips). And, thanks to a special program by our local power company -- a big thank you to IPL -- it costs about a penny a mile for eV operation and I have a smart meter and a 220V charging station at no cost to me. In the long run, even hybrids are a stopgap. But pure electrics like the Leaf and the Tesla are real hard to deal with when there is ice on the windshield and too low a battery charge to be able to both melt the ice and drive the car home. If I lived in Southern California, one of our family cars might be electric, but even the most dismal climate change enthusiasts don't expect that kind of warming for Indiana in the 21st century. Dad's advice was almost always good, so I had to think long and hard before violating it. (Both of my brothers have standard Priuses bought after the car had been available a few years.) But Dad also taught us to do what we believe in, and the need for Americans to adopt more energy efficient ways of doing things is high on what I believe. And it probably doesn't hurt that -- thanks in good measure to my parents assistance and encouragement -- I have more disposable income than they had. "A foolish consistency," Emerson said, "is the hobgoblin of little minds."