busybee fluffy rambles

Ughhhh, this has been a heck of a week.

As usual I’ve been full of pain. And my brief surge of enthusiasm for working on music got cut kind of short because of it. But I’m hoping that tomorrow feels better and I can go back to the studio.

I’m also not sure where I stand with my fatigue. The last few days I’ve had to run quick errands by car and those felt fine. But I’m not feeling courageous enough to drive further just yet, especially with how any escape from White Center means following curvy roads which are especially triggering to me.

Carvana hauled away the Niro today and I am now about $13K richer.

Well, I was, until I then spent $1500 on an extremely well-regarded ebike. Currently it’s on Black Friday sale for $1300 with an incredibly generous bundle of accessories (all things I wanted to get anyway), and I upgraded the seat. Then tax brought it to $1480 all-in.

The specs on this Lectric XPress 750 are amazing, and I haven’t found a single bad thing said about it on the various eBike reddits (and a lot of glowing praise). And then if I want to fit more cargo, it works with a trailer as well.

Depending on how things go I’ll still probably want to consider the e-Rickshaw at some point as a dedicated cargo vehicle, but that’s still based on some extreme hypotheticals. Having just a bike is enough for now.

I have two pending offers on my car: $13,200 from Carvana for a straight sale, and $14,372 from a local dealership for a tradein. Here’s some of my thought processes about which one to take.

In 2022 I traded in my Mazda3 for a Nissan LEAF, which cost me about $1000 all-in. The LEAF was a pretty great car that I liked a lot, but it had a couple of critical features, namely that the lack of active battery thermal management meant that its range got super low in the winter and the battery was degrading quite quickly, and being stuck on CHAdeMO made it very stressful to find a quick charge the rare times when I needed one (which happened just often enough that I was getting worried).

It’s car registration renewal time! Let’s see how much having an EV saved or cost me.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a roundup of current and upcoming EVs. Even though I don’t drive very much, I still like to keep track of where EVs are especially for everyday people who aren’t doing massive amounts of driving or cargo-hauling or whatever. I have no plans to upgrade away from my 2019 Niro any time soon, but I do know a lot of people who are EV-curious but not curious enough to do actual research, so I like to know where things are at.

With all of the FUD going around right now and the American auto industry’s hyperfixation on making everything into giant SUVs, I thought it’d be nice to raise awareness of the neat stuff that’s still happening.

A question that keeps on coming up in my conversations is: where exactly is the electric vehicle adoption the highest?

There’s plenty of information about it on a per-country basis but I couldn’t find anything that breaks it down by US state. So I did a little number-crunching, and figured I’d post it here so that other people can benefit from it.