Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Cars can drive themselves. They’re almost more computer than machine. There are 797 cars for every 1000 people in our country which means there is more than one vehicle for every adult of driving age in our country. Cars are a commodity item and they’ve moved into the 21st century.

But one part of the car experience is still stuck in ancient times: sales. I can sometimes enjoy bartering, but I rarely talk to a car salesman and don’t walk out feeling like I need to take a shower. Their tactics haven’t changed in decades. Go read this (long, but valuable) article from edmunds before you walk into a dealer and then watch the salesguy try the various tricks listed in the book. You’ll switch from feeling like you’re getting hustled to feeling annoyed at the various attempts to hustle you. It’s obnoxious, condescending and rude.

To make things worse, It doesn’t end once you argue about your trade-in and your new car. It continues into the finance guy’s office where you’re assaulted with endless add-ons like coatings for your vehicle, extended warranties, pre-paid maintenance plans, interest rates and much more. Some of the sheets presented are very clever in that they leave off the last option which is to not pay for anything extra. Tyla and I saved a couple thousand bucks after we’d set the price of the car and the trade-in by continuing to haggle on the other numbers, and that even doesn’t include the items we completely refused.

There’s not much incentive for dealers to change their strategy as this allows them to extract maximum profit from each individual customer. Flat rate, no-haggle pricing does exist to some extent. Saturn is famous for this but they still find ways to get you by making you buy extra options you didn’t want, etc. I can’t figure out why this hasn’t swept the nation yet. Maybe we haven’t reached the tipping point yet where there are enough of these dealers to raise awareness. Random studies I found on the internet say that over 2/3 of car buyers would prefer a no-haggle environment. It seems like a pretty big untapped market to me.

Shortly after we got married, Tyla got her dream car: a Volkswagen Beetle. She loved that car, but the idea of a car seat and a baby in it didn’t thrill either of us so it was time to trade it in. We are now the proud owners of a 2013 Ford Escape SEL 4WD! It’s fun to see Tyla driving a brand new car for the first time in her life. When we started our test drive it had 22 miles on it. Also, we finally have a vehicle which will comfortably seat four adults!

Edge vs Escape
We had originally been shooting for an Edge but we just couldn’t justify the extra cost over the Escape. The interior dimensions on the Escape are very similar to the Edge and that was one of our main criteria. I had also liked the Edge because of it’s AWD which is very nice in the winter in the mountains or in the hills around town when it does snow/ice. I started changing my mind about the Edge when I learned that the Escapes have an intelligent 4WD system. I’m still not clear on why one is called All Wheel Drive and the other is Four Wheel Drive. Both are engaged at all times and direct power to whatever wheels have the most traction. For example, when you take off from a stop on dry pavement with the Escape, power starts at the rear wheels since they have more traction from the weight transfer. As your speed levels off, the power shifts to the front of the car.

Another goal for the Edge was to have something that could tow a utility trailer with my motorcycle on it. The Edge can tow 3000 pounds. The Escape can tow 3500 pounds with the 2.0L engine and 2000 pounds with the 1.6L engine. After going back and forth quite a bit, we landed on the smaller engine and no factory installed hitch. If I really need to tow something with the Escape, I can install a hitch for a couple hundred bucks and get it done. Alternately I can buy some booze and bribe one of my many local friends/relatives who have trucks.

Engine Technology
Some of you are probably thinking it’s crazy to put a 1.6L engine in an SUV. The secret is that it’s Ford’s “EcoBoost” engine which they’re putting in a lot of vehicles across their product line. They deliver more horsepower and torque with smaller engine displacement by adding turbochargers into the system. If you didn’t know the engine was so small, you’d probably never notice it until you stopped at the pump and realized you got 30+ mpg on your road trip. The four cylinder 1.6L engine puts out 178hp compared to the non EcoBoost 2.5L engine that supplies 168hp. Better mileage and more power? Sign me up.

One catch with the EcoBoost engine is that to get the full power numbers out of them, you need to run premium gas. It runs fine on normal gas, but you lose 4-5% horsepower. It sounds like people generally run the lower octane gas and then put the good stuff in if they need to tow or are in some other demanding situation.

Warranty
I think my biggest concern with the car is not the engine or the drivetrain, but the gadgets. They’re awesome, and in most cases they make a lot of sense, but they’re just more things that can break. For the first time ever in my life, I succumbed to the extended warranty (once I had talked him down to their internal employee pricing numbers) because I believe that I’ll come out ahead in the long run. I suppose that’s somewhat of a negative vote of confidence for the gadgets, but this also is the first year for the completely redesigned Escape. And while it’s using tech and parts from other successful cars in the Ford lineup, Dad always said to give them a year or two to work out the bugs before jumping in.

Choosing Ford
So we’re back in the Ford family (my uncle works there so most of the extended family drives Fords.) It honestly took a LOT to get me to not buy a Subaru Forrester or Outback as our family vehicle. I absolutely love my Subaru and we have an incredible local mechanic who works on my car. While our family has always had good luck with Fords in the past, the real tipping point for me was the My Ford Touch system and the various technology options available on it. I haven’t seen any other car manufacturer that can match the complete package that Ford offers these days in terms of engine/drivetrain tech and interior tech. Additionally they’re a US company and they’re the only US company that didn’t take a government bailout. Those are traits I want to support with my dollars.

This post is getting long enough so I’ll cut it off here, but tomorrow I’ll share some thoughts on the car buying process and then once I get through all the various buttons and screens in the car, I’ll have some posts about the tech inside.

When Jay came through town, he said we needed to go to Home Depot to buy some hardware to make a game he’d just learned called bimini ring. The basic idea is that you have a ring connected to a string. You swing it forward and attempt to get it to hook onto a hook sticking out of the wall. Simple, but complicated!

The game started in England hundreds of years ago and over there it’s called “Ringing the Bull” because they used a bull nose ring. When the English settled the Caribbean, they brought that game with them and it really caught on. Bimini is a town in the Bahamas and I guess that’s where it got it’s new name.

It’s not a wildly exciting game, but as with most games like this, it’s a fun way to pass time with friends. Once you get the hang of it, you can get it to stick on the hook fairly regularly. The official scoring rules require a ringer to get any points, but an easier way to play includes giving points if you just touch the hook on the wall with the ring. And since this game is from the Caribbean, I’ve added my own suggested rule of playing with rum in your hand. You can check online to find the measurements for setting up your own game.

This game is super cheap and can be played just about anywhere. I think we’ll be adding it to our regular set of games which also includes bocce ball, Kan Jam, hillbilly horseshoes, and of course, corn hole.

In the past you’ve had to shell out hundreds of dollars to get the Microsoft Office suite, or maybe you got it for a little less with your new computer. Then you’re stuck with that version no matter what versions arrive later. And what if you have five computers in your house? Well either you break the law or you buy a bunch of copies. It’s a big cost.

With Office 2013, Microsoft is launching a new way to buy Office. You can now buy a subscription for one year for just $100. That subscription works on up to 5 devices! Mac, PC, handheld devices, etc are all included. You can easily manage which computers/devices are included in the subscription and change them as you go. And each of those computers gets a full version of office that would cost $400 for each computer if you bought the actual full copy of Office. Additionally, it comes with 25GB of extra storage on SkyDrive and some Skype minutes.

If you have a bunch of computers in your house and you like to keep them all up to date, check out this new subscription service.

Note: I realize that some of you are anti-vaccine. This post is being written because I find it amazing that we can have an epidemic like this, not necessarily to try to change your mind about vaccines.

Visits to the OBGYN are usually full of facts about things that have never crossed my mind before. On one of our first trips, we were asked if we had been vaccinated recently for whooping cough. I’d never even heard of it. Maybe I’m the only one, but I’ll explain a bit anyway.

The scientific name for whooping cough is pertussis. It’s a bacterial disease that causes severe coughing fits. In serious cases, it can result in death. A research paper from 2012 says that it affects 48.5 million people and kills 295,000 every year. It spreads through droplets produced while coughing, talking and sneezing. Young children are most susceptible to the disease and run the greatest risk of death if contracted.

It turns out that I had received a whooping cough vaccine at a few points in my life, though not recently. It’s commonly distributed as part of your tetnus shot, or TDaP which stands for Tetnus, Diphtheria and Pertussis. That’s usually given every 10 years but the pertussis vaccine is only good for three years.

Little did I know that I’ve been walking through a whooping cough war zone for the past year. The Department of Health for Washington has a good website with lots of information about the outbreak. This report shows that last year the levels were 15 times greater than the baseline and eight times greater than what they would call an epidemic! Thankfully the numbers are starting to decline through education and vaccination.

The docs recommend that we get the vaccine ourselves and also ask anyone who is planning to have close contact with our child to do the same. I got mine done last week (insurance covered the cost) and Tyla will get it at a specific upcoming point in her pregnancy. Even if you’re not around babies a lot, it’s worth considering getting vaccinated to help control the spread of this disease.

It looks like the Post Office is going to cut Saturday delivery to save money. It’s a novel idea: cut costs to balance your budget. No wonder it’s causing so much confusion in D.C. But regardless of the politics or whether it’s even legal for them to do this, I think the Post Office is missing some big opportunities.

What is the biggest asset of the USPS? They employ a workforce that touches almost every household in the country 6 out of every 7 days. How many dotcoms have we watched fail because their service couldn’t handle the costs of a workforce like that? Maybe they really have to cut Saturday delivery to save money, but what else could they be doing to make more money instead of just delivering mail?

Imagine if you could pay a USPS worker to knock on the door of your elderly relative every day and report back to you if nobody answers the door. Or what if you could pay a USPS worker to clean any packages or fliers off your doorstep when you’re on vacation?

It seems that the volume of mail is going to keep declining. Are they just going to keep cutting days of service? Or will they make use of their army of employees to broaden their horizons and change their business model?

In the post about my beard, I mentioned that part of the reason for doing this was that when I was a kid, I saw some pictures of Dad with a beard and thought it was hilarious. It seemed like a fun thing to do for my son too. Mom has embarked on a project to scan in thousands of slide photos and she stumbled across the photos of Dad’s beard. I think it looks pretty good! The shirt in the second photo maybe not so much.

Tyla commented that Mom looks about as thrilled with Dad’s beard as Tyla is with mine. I had to explain that for as long as I can remember (and apparently longer), Mom’s eyes are magically closed in almost every picture! There may be some supernatural forces at work.

But seriously, thanks to Mom for digging up these photos and for spending countless hours in front of the scanner salvaging these slides. It will be an amazing historical record of our family for decades to come.

A couple weeks ago, Don, Logan and I made two full batches of beer at Gallagher’s. Last weekend it was done and ready to bottle. Each batch makes about 140 12oz bottles so we had a lot of work ahead of us. Thankfully Ken and Tim showed up to help.

We had been saving enough bottles so we didn’t need to buy any at the brewery. We did, however, have to sanitize them before starting. Note that this is sanitization, not cleaning the bottles. Don took charge of running that machine and keeping us stocked with bottles. Logan and I took turns filling the bottles while Tim and Ken took turns capping the bottles and putting them in the boxes. We all shared the responsibility of drinking some of the beer. We ended up with about 11 cases of beer and we bottled it all in under two hours. Half of it is like Redhook ESB and the other half is a hefeweizen. I’m not a huge fan of the hefeweizen but it’s good and I love the ESB.

Once ski season is done I’d love to get in a more regular habit of making beer there. The final cost for our beer was about $1.15/bottle which isn’t bad at all. That’s about what I pay at the grocery store. So far we’ve made three of their 50 or so recipes. I want to come up with my own concoction, but I don’t know enough about how the flavors work together. I guess I need more practice!

Happy Valentine’s Day to the love of my life and the mother of our unborn son!

Late one night a few years ago, I discovered a Martens Brewery in Belgium. For a 255 year old brewery, they have an embarrassingly bad website that stymied my attempts to learn more about them. Here’s what I do know. The brewery is in Bocholt Belgium and it was founded in 1758. Their signature beer is the Martens Pilsner, and like me, it’s tall. It’s sold in 16.9 oz cans. I don’t know how big they are, but they do seem to be distributed around the world since I found a Taiwanese commercial for Martens beer. But that’s about where my research ended. I couldn’t figure out how to buy any.

When Andy and Stephanie showed up to watch the Super Bowl, he had a four pack of Martens Pilsner! Apparently they sell it at a local Whole Foods, and after checking the Total Wine website, I think they might have it too. I was so excited to finally get to try it! At the risk of offending my namesake brewery, the beer isn’t anything to special and is reminiscent of a Coors Light. Then again, I’d say that about a lot of pilsners. Yes I realize they’re different types of beer, but they’re so different from my normal beer that they kind of blend together in my memory.

So now I have a source for Martens beer. My quest continues to find t-shirts, hats, neon signs, pint glasses, or anything else from the brewery. This might require a trip to Belgium.