June 2015 Driving Stats; The Pitfalls of Budget Transportation

Ok, first off; the front end woes of my Corolla continued resulting in 3 more trips to the shop resulting in a final repair bill of $532.66.  Added to the previous trip (when my wheel almost fell off) of $728.94 essentially makes my $2300 car a $3500 car but at least the front end does not make any noise anymore, at least not yet anyway...

As far as the Corolla goes, it went 323.1 miles (about half was trips to the repair shops along with random test drives)  for nothing!~!   well, not really but did not purchase gas in June so using the last purchase in May, It cost $23.86 or roughly 7.4 cents per mile. There is just over a quarter tank left but will probably fill it before its next use for easy math purposes for lack of a better reason.

The LEAF went 1375.2 miles at a cost of $24.22 soaking me at the rate of 1.76 cents per mile. Included in that cost was a pitstop at Tahoma Market for a buck 66 of electrons.  I did use the "free bucket" network 5 times.

Today I proved our crappy freeway system makes Nissan good on their 100 mile claim.  One would think at 4:45 AM there would be no traffic slowdown but noooo... still had roughly 10-12 miles of reduced speeds including the typical Tacoma Dome stretch and Southcenter stretch where the speeds average 20 mph on good days.  All in all, drove 98.5 miles with a kwh to spare

I had actually planned to do a pit stop in Tacoma after dropping off paperwork at the office and get a TB test (required every year...) at the same time but found that my remaining range was enough to get home so I got TB test in Lacey after lunch instead!

And for those of you who think the above was mostly in town driving, not the case. Granted there were stretches of the freeway that were slow but it still was about 75-80% at 60 mph. Besides, 5.2 miles per kwh around town is definitely nothing to brag about.

This is in town driving!

June was warm, in fact the warmest on record. It was so warm that it would have been the 8th hottest August on record (August is our hottest month with average highs of 78º. Average highs in June is 73°) and today its 92º with promises of 90's for 7 of the next 12 days (we average 5 days in the 90's each Summer)  so looks like we are quickly losing our "climate" advantage for battery degradation.

As always, I will keep you posted!