The Week #156

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  • This is post #156 of The Week, which means it's the 3rd year of posting this series! I'm happy that I haven't missed a week or been off schedule once during these 3 years, though there has been a couple of point where I questioned if I should continue. This series is the one thing that's kept me blogging regularly, I think. Each bullet point in a The Week post doesn't feel like enough to warrant a post, but combined they do. If you're wanting to blog / blog more, I highly recommend starting with this approach. Here's to the next 3 years 🍻.
  • I bought the Nissan Sakura. We picked blue and it's similar enough to our current blue that bystanders passing our house may think we've accidentally put our car in the wash and it shrunk. We won't get it August or early September. That said, I'm really excited to get a smaller, electric, car. If it weren't electric, I don't think we'd be switching. I tooted about it, but negotiations when buying a car is the part of the car buying process I hate the most. Especially when the car isn't having problems selling, because they give less ground. 

    In the end I managed to get ¥75,000 off the top and take part in a campaign that doesn't start until next month. In the campaign you get 4 different things: ¥5,000 in Yokosuka city voucher, a ¥5,000 yen gift from a catalog, ¥20,000 if gift cards, and pair tickets to a "famous amusement park" (probably Disneyland)...so probably around ¥50,000 in value. Unrelated to negotiations there's also ¥550,000 cashback from the government (will take a couple months after receiving the car for them to deposit) and ¥80,000 from Nissan to support installing a car charging port on my house. After selling my car ¥1,800,000 and including all incentives I'm only paying about ¥1,000,000 for the car ($6,959.02 with today's horrible exchange rate).
  • As part of selling my car, I have to prepare a couple of documents for selling / buying my car. Theoretically I can do this now from the big copiers at 7-11, but I wasn't sure if I could get my stamp registration certificate or not, so I went to city hall. Either it's years of experience or city hall digitizing their systems or a combination of both, but it was completely painless. No long lines or anything. I was in and out in probably 10 minutes.
  • I've been noticing more and more EVs on the roads lately, which makes me happy for air quality, noise, and climate reasons. Naturally since I've been looking at Sakuras, I've realized just how popular they've become (over 40k sold in a year). There's also more EV postal vans and postal bikes. The one category of transport I haven't yet seen electrified in Japan is the trucks that visit each combini multiple times a day to deliver fresh goods. I swear you can see the particulates in the air when these things pass. I hadn't seen one until this week when walking to the office and it made me really happy.
    An EV delivery truck
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