Numbers

Fun With Numbers

New Mexico Trip Edition

The trip was to help a friend start to set up her new household in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The house is in the quintessential New Mexico adobe style and has 4 bedrooms and 3-1/2 baths with 10′ ceilings. Quite large for a single woman, but this is because she expects visits from several wings of her extended family (of which we are part of), some possibly overlapping.

She had received some of her furniture and kitchen stuff, so we at least had a bed to sleep on, but the rest of the place was, well, very uncluttered. Sally had really only been in the house for the past 2 weeks and she still had boxes everywhere that needed unpacking, Donna helped with that, and I went around and changed out a bunch of non-working light bulbs and a few other small “handyman” type jobs.

We were away from home for 10 days, 7 of them were traveling the roads of 5 of this country’s west and the other 3 were spent in and around 1 city, in 1 of those states. The rental car was ours for a total of 11 days in which we drove 2,819 miles. On the one total day that our Mitsubishi Outlander Sport was not traveling we added 5 miles picking it up, grocery shopped on our return, filling it up, picking up the Mini and returning it.

We bought gas a total of 8 times and purchased 92 gallons for $362 for an average cost of $3.93 per gallon. This is skewed a little lower because we used our Kroger gas points for 2 of the 8 fill ups, with out these points our average cost would have been $4.08 per gallon. The most expensive gas in Utah at $4.599 and the cheapest was in New Mexico at a Native American Pueblo. We averaged 30.5 MPG which is pretty good gas mileage for the size of the Outlander Sport.

We spent 5 nights in a motel, 4 of which were in Holiday Inn Expresses. The lone off-brand night was in Beatty, Nevada, because there are literally only a half dozen motels in town, and that was in a Motel 6. We spent $615 total on motels for an average of $123 a night. The most expensive stay was in Carson City, Nevada. And the least expensive was also in Nevada, the Motel 6 in Beatty.

Sport, Off-Road, Touring: Year 1 by the Numbers

Last week as I finished my Monday trolling of Bring A Trailer looking for my perfect 3-car garage I realized that it was week fifty-two. I told myself that I should do a wrap-up of all the cars I “bought” during that year as my next post. I promptly forgot all about it.

So, this week on Monday as I started the next Sport, Off-Road, Touring post I stopped and went ahead and started to record all my “purchases.” Turns out it takes a pretty long time to go back and look up the information on that many cars, so about half way through I abandoned the count and went ahead and picked my 3 cars for week one of year two.

So, here we go: The 156 cars I picked, if I actually won their auctions, would have cost me $11,127,321. That is an average of $71,389 for each vehicle, so obviously I was not bargain hunting.

The most expensive car I picked was in the Sport category, a 1957 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing at $1,152,0001. The second most expensive auto was in the Off-Road category, a 2014 Mercedes-Benz G63 AMG 6×62 at $901,333. The next 22 cars in order of price were all in the 6-figure range, so this probably skews that average car cost up.

The least expensive car I picked was from Off-Road category, a 2003 Land Rover Discovery II SE at a mere $6,200. It took until the sixth next highest cost car before we got to the ten-thousand-dollar mark.

The oldest car I picked was a 350-Powered 1940 Ford Deluxe Coupe. There were 4 more cars selected from the 40’s, fourteen from the 50’s, eighteen from the 60’s and 28 from the 70’s. Taking all cars into account, the average model year car would be from 1986, even though just 20 of the 156 cars came from the 80’s. There are 18 cars from the 90’s, the 2000’s had the most cars chosen with 31 and there were nineteen picked from 2010-2019. The newest cars were from the year 2020, two Chevy C-8 Corvettes and a replica Land Rover Defender 90 NAS.

The cars came from 41 separate manufacturers. The most popular make was BMW with 17. Mercedes-Benz was the runner-up with 13. Porsche, Toyota and Ford were 3rd with twelve cars & trucks each. There were 17 one car manufacturers, including 3 that make just make replicas of cars that in original form can no longer be afforded by anyone but billionaires. And finally, one of those 1 car manufacturers, knowing me, would be probably be considered a surprise, Mazda. I only picked one Miata, but that is probably tempered a bit by the fact that I already have one.

The most chosen model name was Land Cruiser (Toyota) with 8 and the runner-up was Corvette with 6. Apropos of nothing, there were 48 car names that started with numbers and 38 more that were mostly number based.

Now for some nonsense3. The most popular car, if it existed, would be a 2004 Mercedes-Benz Land Cruiser that costs $23,000 and the most average car, if it existed, would be a 1986 Honda 914 that costs $71,389.

Track, Daily, Crush by the Numbers

First off, yesterday wasn’t the 52nd Edition of TDC at all, it was the 53rd. I didn’t count the 45th one because it happened on 4/20 and was cutely entitles Track, Happily Daily, Crush.

I went back and gathered up all the names of all the cars that appeared and entered them into a spreadsheet (csv file.) and out of 159 vehicles, the:

Most Tracked – Porsche with 10
Runner Up – Ford with 4

Most Dailied – VW with 7
Runner Up – Ferrari & BMW with 5

Most Crushed – Ford with 5
Runner Up – Chevrolet & VW with 3

Most Mentioned Make – Ford & Porsche with 16
Runner-Up – Volkswagen with 11

Most Mentioned Model – Miata & 911 with 9
Runner Up – Mustang with 5