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Heather Gold Show 9.21.07

Heather Gold is blessed by adjectives: intelligent, progressive, funny.  We’d like to add “luscious” to that list.  After a serendipitious (and now famous) exchange of voicemail, HG has chosen LG to be the new home for her avant-garde talk show, with the first on September 21st, 2007 (to follow on every second Friday of the month). 

For information on tickets and the show, check out HeatherGold.com.

For everything else, visit her aptly-named blog subvert.com.

Posted by Carolyn Comments 0 Permalink Categories: Community »

LG Hiring

Welcome applicants for our primary technician position!  After much ado about startup, we are ready to fix some cars and are looking for the right person to join us.  This could be your bay:



The job is posted on three sites (SFBA Craigslist,
iATN, PriusChat) as follows:

Luscious Garage hiring a Hybrid Specialist

Luscious Garage is a brand new hybrid specialty shop located in downtown San Francisco. Our business is tailored around the hybrid car and its owner. We are high-tech, cutting edge, and environmentally conscious; we maintain a clean, attractive, well-appointed facility for customers as well as staff.

This opening is the first for our two-bay shop. You will join me, the owner and lead technician, in building the business and introducing it to the public. LG is first-of-its-kind with enormous opportunity to experience this burgeoning market and to create your ideal workplace.

The bulk of our work is preventative maintenance, light duty repair, and diagnostics on hybrids and a few of their non-hybrid siblings. We also perform hybrid modifications, both low and high voltage.

For more information on the business and our services, visit our website at lusciousgarage.com.


Business highlights:

* specialization in hybrid cars

* web-based, customer-driven administration

* full disclosure on practices and prices

* clean and green as possible

* exciting downtown location in a beautiful facility

* woman owned and operated


Unique aspects of the position:

* gainful salary commensurate on experience

* health insurance included

* 4/10 work week (closed Sat-Mon)

* two weeks paid vacation

* access to OE equipment and service information


Ideal candidates will possess:

* Passion for hybrid technology

* Tech and internet savvy

* Professional appearance and attitude

* Quest for betterment of personal performance and business performance

* Patience and thoughtfulness

* Emotional stability and maturity

* Ability to communicate with collegues and customers

* Willingness, if not passion, to purchase and maintain the correct tools

* Interest in assuming leadership roles over time

* Tolerance of mundane jobs with promise of greater challenges to come

* Certifications, iATN membership, and formal education a definite plus


This is a excellent opportunity for the thinking technician hungry for hybrid experience and an enlightened work atmosphere. Diverse backgrounds are invited but competency comes first.

Serious applicants submit a resume with cover letter to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

I will review candidates through September; latecomers welcome.

 

Posted by Carolyn Comments 34 Permalink Categories:

Perfect Sky Training, 8.20.07

Luscious Garage is proud to host its first hybrid training class this Monday, August 20th from 6:30 to 10pm.  Jack Rosebro of Perfect Sky will present for collision technicians on the proper procedures for coolant and brake service and accessing inspection modes for Toyota, Lexus, Honda, and Ford hybrids. The class also includes hands-on practice of these techniques in our shop. 

Indeed auto body shops have seen the most challenging mechanical repairs on hybrids to date and need the appropriate training to make sure these cars are not harmed further in putting them back together.  Cooking the battery in the paint booth is one often-cited example; in fact, the potential for trouble is everywhere, even in seemingly basic systems like cooling and brakes. Jack Rosebro (pictured with a wrecked Prius) is outstanding in his work and this class promises to be another gem.

Posted by Carolyn Comments 1 Permalink Categories: Community »

Hummer v. Prius

CNW Marketing Research Inc. recently released a provocative report that concluded that many cars were “greener” than hybrids (Hummers, for instance) for to their “dust to dust” cost to society.  The report has received a good deal of press, including this column in Globe and Mail:

Which cars are the greenest?  You’d be surprised

The Pacific Institute has since published a response debunking many of CNW’s conclusions:

Hummer versus Prius: “Dust to Dust” Report Misleads the Media and Public with Bad Science”

Posted by Carolyn Permalink Categories:

Not Crude

The collusion between auto and oil goes beyond fuel; it permeates every corner of the machine, from the rubber wiper blades to the nylon safety belts.  Much of the car is recyclable, a fact readily cited by manufacturers in environmental forums.  How much is actually recycled depends widely on the waste stream.  A fraction of the new car is built from post-consumer recycled product (though it is getting better).  In short, today’s car is unsustainable.

Lubrication is but one aspect of the car’s oil dependence, but it’s one that we can’t easily forget, exactly because we’re reminded to “change the oil” every several thousand miles.  The motoring public—with its poor retention of technical details—has been brow-beaten into an oil-change routine every three thousand miles.  For new cars, this is excessive, but less frequent changes still entail oil consumption, something the hybrid owner may rue to accept.

The fabulous news is that oil changes need not require new oil.  Well, it depends on how you define “new” exactly.  As it turns out, when oil becomes “used” it is not actually the oil that degrades, but the additives and modifiers imbedded within.  “Refining” oil is what distills it out of crude, but the process includes the additive package as well. 

If you’ve ever encountered crude oil, you know how absolutely nasty it is.  In fact it bears little resemblance to the motor oil we pour in the engine (except that it’s oily).  Crude is exactly that—crude.  It stinks something awful, it’s dirty, and it needs a lot of work to turn into all the things we use it for. 

Enter re-refined oil.  Presumably not long after it became illegal to pour used oil into a hole in the ground, the “waste” oil that drained out of engines was recaptured and hauled away by an oil “recycler”.  From conversations with former collegues and shop owners, it appears the process was more “reuse” than recycle, where a stationary engine (or less sensitive machine) would inherit the lubricant and churn away none-the-wiser.  Eventually these recyclers learned that the waste oil still had chemical value and could be re-refined (reincarnated, if you will) back to new oil.  If you think about it, waste oil, however used, is cleaner than crude oil and retains the same molecular strength.

There is a longstanding prejudice about re-refined oil in the auto industry because of the original practice of simply reusing waste oil in other engines.  “Recycling” meant running it through a sock and nothing more.  But rerefined oil is different; I’m told that there is no test, no inspection under a microscope, no way to differentiate fresh, new oil that has come from a crude source versus rerefined oil from waste.  For me, once this prejudice was dismissed, I was determined to get rerefined oil, locally and in bulk, for Luscious Garage, and in the grades used in most hybrid engines.  This came true today with the help of Coast Oil and Golden Gate Petroleum.  We now offer 100% rerefined oil that meets the ILSAC GF-4 standard (the highest standard for all manufacturers) in both 5W30 and 5W20 grades, in bulk, for our oil changes.  We do not offer virgin alternatives except when the engine calls for a different grade (the Insight requires 0W20, for instance).  Though it makes perfect sense, I should also clarify that this oil is no more expensive than the virgin-sourced variety.

Therefore, even though the engine continues to burn fossil fuel, its oil-based lubricants can be sustainable. 

 

Posted by Carolyn Comments 27 Permalink Categories: Green »