Here’s the deal – I live in my car. That’s to say I spend almost two hours every day dragging my sad briefcase across two counties to the salt mines. For the privilege I shuck out over $400 big ones to fill the ample gas tank on my lumbersexual Jeep TJ.
But you can only push a man so far. I broke out the yellow pad and a stubby pencil and applied an advanced form of math known as Teslanomics to calculate how much it would cost me to lease a plug-in hybrid.
Turns out on paper I could actually MAKE MONEY by leasing an electric powered car. And don’t worry, the plan is only slightly more complicated than Milo Minderbinder’s arrangement to buy eggs for 7 cents, sell them to the US government for 5 cents, clearing an 8 cent profit per egg. Basically it hinges on getting the monthly lease payment down below what I pay for gasoline.
So I went ahead and pulled the trigger on a lease for a BMW i3 – loaded (or maybe half-loaded) and joined the ranks of electron moochers who comb the streets looking for charge points the way ants look for sugar. I will confess that an idiotic mistake on my part at the dealership ended up with me getting an extra $50 sliced off the monthly payment. Horse trading is overrated, you simply need to be dumb and have lots of luck.
So life is good, right? I HAD NO IDEA A BMW WOULD BE SO FRICKIN’ EXPENSIVE TO INSURE!!!! My stubby pencil math went bad at this point. Maureen and I had some time earlier calculated insurance premiums on the basis of a STUPID CHEVY SPARK. The cost of insurance seemed no obstacle (see CHEVY SPARK, above) to carrying out my evil plan. So it was all systems go. Until it wasn’t.
Well, here I am, an electron hobo with a shiny BMW i3 plugged into my garage, working an extra two hours a day in the mines to make up for a couple of bad numbers. Your mileage may vary.
