In the past few weeks, my wife and I finally decided it was time to buy a car for our business. The old minivan, which has had double family and work duty for four years, will continue to menace the streets of Chicago as it tears up the local pavement, spilling cheerios and leaking kiddie bodily fluids on our potholed streets (see the post: Friday Rant: Don’t Buy My Used Minivan — Spend Management’s Limitson why never to buy this thing from us). This realization of needing a new work vehicle has led to countless nights of wasted vacation (and post-vacation) time reading reports and watching You Tube video reviews (I’m partial to Top Gear and especially loved this review that helped us rule out a used BMW X6) as we once again come up to speed on what’s possible to buy if the kids won’t be riding in the thing.
In the process of getting smart on cars during our vacation, it became apparent to us that the car we wanted to buy won’t, in fact, be a car. In other words, the used 4 door Acura, Audi or what have you doesn’t make economic sense for a reason I’ll get to in a minute. Nor does the other suggestion I tossed out, the Chevy Volt. Even though it comes courtesy of Government Motors, I find the fully electric Volt intriguing and a great middle finger to oppressive oil producing nations (I don’t care about green — I care about energy independence). All things being equal, the Volt is the car I’d most like to own, especially if we could find a creative way to, well, freely tap power from our parking garage (no comment on the schematics I worked out on this one already).
Yet as business owners, we won’t be buying the Volt. It turns out that our government still wants us to buy a thirsty SUV. We thought this crazy provision was phased out years ago…
