Donate Car to Charity California, Donate Car for Tax Credit, Donate Cars in MA, Donate Your Car Sacramento, How to Donate A Car in California, Donate Your Car for Kids, Donate a Car in Maryland, Donating a Car in Maryland, Donate Cars Illinois, Donate Old Cars to Charity, Met Auto, Car Donate Bigger vehicles with better fuel economy are coming Up to this point, if you wanted to get great fuel economy, you had to drive something small. But that was then, this is now. Several new vehicles are coming to market that won’t ask you to trade the American preference for larger vehicles for increased fuel savings. The theme at the recent Detroit Auto Show seemed to be bigger vehicles that are fuel efficient. Leading the way was Toyota and a new crossover vehicle that will get 42 miles per gallon. (The typical mpgs is low to mid 20s on comparable models.) Then you have Ford, which is introducing the C-MAX, with a small turbo-charged engine at the heart of a scaled-down minivan-like vehicle. The C-MAX is expected to sell millions and there will be various versions, one of which will be a hybrid and another of which will be a plug-in hybrid. The hybrid will get tremendous fuel economy, somewhere in the low 40s. The plug-in hybrid, meanwhile, is harder to measure, but is expected to get significantly higher than that. We are in a mode where the average fuel economy of our vehicles must increase dramatically in next 5 years by law. We’ll get there with variety of technologies that still let you drive the kind and size of car you want. And that’s good stuff! Pay as you drive insurance offers savings for infrequent motorist What’s commonly called “pay as you drive” (PAYD) insurance offers you the chance to save on your auto insurance, but you might not like the creepout factor involved with this controversial coverage. Years ago, I talked about an experiment from Progressive where the insurance carrier was using a spybot in your car to track every mile you drove, how fast you drove and the time of day, among other factors. That info allowed them to assess how much of a danger you would pose to them as a driver. They could then give you a variable insurance rate according to your individual driving habits and uses. Progressive’s version of PAYD is now called the Snapshot Discount program. According to the Progressive website, “The Snapshot device records vehicle speed and time of day, and when the device is connected and disconnected from the vehicle. It also records the Vehicle Identification Number upon installation. Other information, such as miles driven and rates of acceleration and braking, is derived from the speed and time information recorded by the device.” Progressive’s Snapshot Discount is now offered in 25 states. Some 25% of Progressive’s customer base takes advantage of it for lower insurance rates. Meanwhile, The Dallas Morning News reports that there are about 10 other companies offering PAYD insurance as well. I love the concept of PAYD. But a lot of people are creeped out by the Big Brother aspect of something like Snapshot Discount. For those people, there’s a company called MileMeter.com that has a different way of doing it. MileMeter.com trusts you to give them updates on your mileage every 6 months and then they charge you based on how much you drive. The less you drive, the less you pay. The more you drive, the more you pay. (Editor’s note: At this time, MileMeter.com is only available to motorists in Texas.) So there are really two models here, the one typified by Progressive and the other from the MileMeter.com folks. Motorists who log mega-miles may cry foul about the idea of PAYD, but here’s how I see it: You already pay more for gas and maintenance, based on how much more you use your car versus a more casual use motorist. So extending that idea to insurance seems to make perfect sense. Whether or not you like it, PAYD will become more common over time.
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