Dan Gray

It’s easy to get sidetracked by the marketing blitz. There are plenty of fuel efficient cars that are neither hybrids nor new. Looking to the conventional used car market for your next vehicle purchase might be a prudent financial move. With the lack of depreciation in many hybrid models, the attractiveness of an older Honda […]

As of Sunday morning, I am now one of the iPhone borg … and I’m in search of gas mileage applications. GigaOM’s Earth2Tech jumped right on the topic on Friday, with a quick rundown on 5 iPhone Apps to Help Save Gas. I didn’t catch the GigaOM post until late on Monday, when I […]

When you look at the historical chart of hybrid gas mileage, you just have to wonder … when are the auto manufacturers going to take things to the next level? The Honda Insight, the earliest hybrid, was rated at 70 miles per gallon on the highway. Granted it was a wee little two seater with […]

I drive a lot of cars in the valiant quest for better gas mileage. But up until last week, I didn’t pay close enough attention to the way I drove the land yacht parked in our driveway … the one with 130000 miles on the clock and the parking lot dings to prove it.
That all […]

Of all the cars we’ve tested this past spring, the Volkswagen EOS convertible is at the front of the pack, largely due to one big thing … it’s drop top coolness. Most folks would be hard-pressed to identify an EOS … it zips through life with a variation of the Romulan cloak of invisibility … […]

Ready or not, the dawn of the electric car era is in sight.
Electric car fanatics gathered at the Plug-in Electric Vehicles 2008 conference last week in Washington DC. The event, hosted by the Brookings Institute and Google.org, packed the main ballroom of the Washington Hyatt on Capitol Hill.
A standing room only crowd heard words of […]

The thermometer hit 100 today and it’s only the 9th of June. It’s time to talk about the other kind of windows again … not Microsoft windows, but the windows on your home. Window tinting, specifically.
I’ve been giving a good bit of thought to installing D-I-Y solar window tinting on a handful of the windows […]

After spending a week reviewing a Ford Focus, I get it.
The Microsoft Sync audio system, trendy design touches, and some of the best gas mileage results found in a domestically manufacturer conventional vehicle make this little critter a winner. It’s easy to see why Focus sales increased a whopping 88% year-over-year for the month of […]

Staycation: it’s new buzzword being pressed by the media. “We can’t afford the gas to leave home this summer, so we’re going to have a staycation right here.
The retailers are using the staycation phenom as justification to grab a chunk of our economic stimulus checks.
Staycation sales … what a concept.
I had all intents of using […]

I’ve been traveling a lot lately, with four cross-country trips in the space of just over two months. Now I know that might not seem like a lot for the most battle weary road warriors out there, but for me, it was monumental.
Two of the first three trips had red eye return flights. While I’m […]

When you’re the geek around the house, technology is where you find it. Last week, I found it in the master bath, when I replaced the original toilet with a hi-tech wonder … the toilet that flushes an entire bucket of golf balls.
It started out as a little job … we just wanted to replace […]

Comcast recently took over our local cable company. We had a clue before the welcome packet arrived in the snail mail … the performance of our cable Internet dropped dramatically.
“Dad! What’s wrong with the Internet?”
When tested with one of the speed testing services, we’re still cranking at a download speed of roughly 3000 kb/s … […]

Who says that money doesn’t grow on trees? Washington has cut the the trees down, printed up a whole bunch of new money … and they’re about to send it out to the taxpayers, in the hopes of jump starting the economy.
So what are you planning to do with your economic stimulus check?
I’m not going […]

Would you drive a hybrid car?
Just a few years back, I never thought I would.
But here it is, Spring 2008 and I’ve just spent a month with four different hybrids — two sedans and two SUVs. I have two more on the way. I’ve made a pledge to deliver hybrid reviews of nearly all of […]

I’ve long pondered this question: If you could control anything via the Internet, what would it be?
Over the years, I’ve come up with lots of crazy ideas, like RFID tagged socks (August ‘04) and net-controlled hot tubs. And I’ve stumbled into plenty of others, like the Proliphix Internet-controlled programmable thermostat.
Sometimes it seems like half of […]

I can’t count how many times I’ve heard (or read) folks say that they “wouldn’t buy a hybrid until it gets 100 miles per gallon (MPG).”
A good bit has changed since I wrote about the CalCars.com mod back in the summer of 2005.
That good bit is the price.
Think 100 MPG is so tough to achieve?
Behold […]

It’s all about the green. We’re all getting squeezed these days. Even if you’re not worried about the environment, you’ve got to be concerned about the green that’s flowing at an ever-increasing rate from your wallet.
Kids can be forgiven for their cluelessness when it comes to wasting energy. Parents are often the ones running around […]

I spent a couple of days at the NY Auto Show press preview last week and have been busy cranking out videos on many of the cool concepts and upcoming releases. If I could use just one word to describe this year’s show, it would have to be electric…
The tiny electric Subaru R1e and Nissan […]

I waded into the chat room last night to talk with Chris about an article I’d just written about 35 mile per gallon (MPG) cars and SUVs. The article’s a bit of an eye-opener in these economically troubled times, but it comes down to some little known facts and a strange twist of market fate. […]

An old buddy of mine has been thinking about picking up a Mac for some time now, but he didn’t know where to start. After I penned a note outlining the most affordable choices, it dawned on me that I should share the info with my gnomie buddies … so, how about them cheap apples?
So […]