HinesSight

Self-publishing, like me? Check out ebookpbook.

I've written four books. Three have been self-published. Or, to use the term Amazon has on my Break Free of Dogma listing, "independently published." 

Last year I praised ebookpbook after this firm ably prepared for just $79 an electronic/Kindle version of a previous book I wrote. See: "If you're looking for a book design firm, I highly recommend ebookpbook."

That book, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, cost a lot for the paperback interior and cover design. Wanting to support a local graphic design firm, I paid them $3,000. That may seem like a lot, but it was in line with what book design companies I checked out via Google were estimating for a book like mine.

So with Break Free of Dogma I had the folks at ebookpbook do the interior design. They also made some adjustments to the cover that I fashioned myself courtesy of a Kindle Direct Publishing template. See above.

This is how much ebookpbook charged me: $249. Fifty dollars was for the cover work. Interior formatting and ebook preparation was $199. 

That's amazingly reasonable. You can check out how the interior design looks by heading to the Amazon listing and clicking on "Look Inside."

By the way, there are a few typos in the 85,000 word, 307 page book. I'm responsible for them. I didn't use the ebookpbook copy editing service, figuring I was capable of doing this myself. I just missed several typos and have vowed to be more careful with my next book.

Which I'm planning to have designed by ebookpbook also. Next time I'll probably have them design a custom cover, since most of the books in their "Portfolio" section look more attractive than the cover I created.

In case you're wondering how ebookpbook manages to do such a good job for such little money, the main reason is that they're located in Chennai, India.

But as noted in my first blog praise of this firm, I would never have known this if I hadn't asked Jason Pearce, the person I worked with last year, where he lived -- since he'd reply to my emails at times that indicated a decidedly distant time zone.

With Break Free of Dogma I worked with Vidya, who was equally competent, professional, timely, and organized. The only time her being in India came up was after I sent her this message:

Vidya, I just read a story about the horrible water problems in Chennai, India, and remembered that Jason said he’s lived there for 14 years. Don’t know if you are in Chennai, but if so, I wanted to express my sympathy for whatever problems you and others may be having. Global warming is causing temperature and precipitation extremes, and the world isn’t doing enough to stop carbon pollution. Very sad.

Vidya replied:

Thank you for your concern Brian. I do live in Chennai but fortunately managing with the resources available. Some parts of the city is very bad, especially the poor, who cannot afford to buy water. I live in an apartment here with three other neighbours and buy water of about 12,000 litres every 3-4 days.

It's marvelous that the Internet has made it so easy to communicate with people halfway around the globe. That said, I'm not recommending ebookpbook because they're in India, but because they make it possible for authors to get their book published at a very reasonable price with ease.

Break Free of Dogma consists of 93 posts from the early years of my Church of the Churchless blog. I basically copied and pasted content from my blog, and sent ebookpbook a manuscript with minimal formatting. No matter. They fashioned a good-looking book from that material in just a few weeks.

Few authors make much money from their books. I'm certainly not raking in the dough from Break Free of Dogma sales. That book was a labor of love for me, not a personal profit center.

So being able to have ebookpbook fashion books at such a reasonable cost makes independent publishing feasible for authors who aren't willing or able to either design a book themselves, or pay someone thousands of dollars to do this.

And that's a gift to the entire world.

Not all vaping is dangerous. Vaping cannabis flower is safe.

I ingest THC and CBD by vaping every day. It's my substitute for a nightly glass of red wine, because I believe cannabis is more beneficial and safer than alcohol.

So it bothers me when reports of vaping illnesses and deaths (including two here in Oregon) make it sound like all kinds of vaping should be given up.

What appears to be dangerous is vaping e-cigarettes containing nicotine, and vaping THC cartridges that contain additives and oil.

A Vox story today, "THC vape products appear to be the main culprit in the mysterious lung illness outbreak," says: 

Investigators appear to be getting closer to uncovering one of the main causes of the outbreak of mysterious lung injuries linked with e-cigarettes: vaping products containing THC, the main psychoactive chemical in cannabis.

On Friday, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials said that while they haven’t figured out exactly which chemical or device is making people sick, the majority of the cases in both national and state studies to date appear to involve THC-based vaping products. Many of them are illicit products labeled with brand names such as “Dank Vape.”

Note the mention of products, chemical, and device. That's because manmade THC cartridges, not the natural loose-leaf cannabis flower, have been implicated in the vaping illnesses.

The cartridges are used with vaping devices. They contain concentrated THC that is considerably stronger than cannabis flower. I used to use THC cartridges, but now only vape ground cannabis flower in my much-beloved PAX3 vaporizer. 

I buy cannabis flower ("buds") that's been tested in accord with Oregon cannabis growing/selling regulations. I grind it into small pieces using my Santa Cruz herb grinder. Then a small amount of ground cannabis goes into the heating receptacle of the PAX3 vaporizer. 

A little goes a long way.

Vaping cannabis flower is far removed from my Cheech & Chong'ish college days in the late 60's when we'd roll joints out of whatever was available on the black market: flower, leaves, seeds... it all was rolled up and smoked.

Which meant we were inhaling, not surprisingly, smoke. Not so with vaping, where, not surprisingly, vapor is inhaled. A PAX web page explains:

A vaporizer is an electronic device that heats dry herb or concentrated cannabis to release vapor. Vaporizing does not combust the plant material, reducing odors. Vaporizing herbs has its roots in ancient history. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote about the use of hot stones to create steam vapor baths as early as 440 BC. We’ve certainly come a long way from using rocks, with many electronic options of varying sizes and capabilities on the market today.

Thus it isn't vaping that is dangerous.

What's causing illnesses and deaths is something in a product that's being vaped. Note in the quotation above that a vaporizer can heat "dry herb or concentrated cannabis." It's the concentrated cannabis that health authorities are worried about, not the dry herb (cannabis flower).

Now, I realize that experienced marijuana consumers already know what I've talked about in this blog post. My intended audience is other people who hear "you should stop vaping" and jump to the conclusion that all varieties of vaping are dangerous.

They aren't. A comment on an Oregonian story about vaping illnesses got it just right.

Wanted: Giant Mutant Squirrels to eat acorns (lots of them!)

In case the audio on my "Wanted" video isn't clearly recognizable by Giant Mutant Squirrels, and they're reading this blog post, I'm hoping they will pay a visit to our home to deal with the amazingly high number of acorns in our yard -- as documented in the video. More than we've ever seen.

A bit of Googling taught me that oak trees go through regular cycles of many/few acorns, seemingly as an evolutionary adaptation. When there are lots of acorns, animals like squirrels can't eat them all, which leaves many acorns to become new oak trees.

That's great for the trees. Not so great for my wife and I, who have to pull up oak starts and run the risk of taking a tumble if we step on some of the little round senior citizen tripper-uppers on our driveway. Hence, the call for Giant Mutant Squirrels.

Here's the full Q&A on this subject from the New York Botanical Garden folks.

Q. Why are there so many acorns this year? Do they foretell a harsh winter?

Answer

Like many trees, oaks have irregular cycles of boom and bust. Boom times, called “mast years,” occur every 2-5 years, with smaller acorn crops in between. But the why and how of these cycles are still a mystery.

Scientific research can tell us what a mast year is not. A mast year is not a predictor of a severe winter. Unfortunately, plants and animals are no better at predicting the future than we are.

Strangely, mast years are not simply resource-driven. Sure, a wet, cool spring can affect pollination and a hot, dry summer can affect acorn maturation. But annual rainfall and temperature fluctuations are much smaller in magnitude than acorn crop sizes. In other words, weather variables cannot account for the excessive nutty production of acorns in a mast year.

So what does trigger a mast year? Scientists have proposed a range of explanations—from environmental triggers to chemical signaling to pollen availability—but our understanding is not clear. The fact is, we simply don’t know yet.

Boom and bust cycles of acorn production do have an evolutionary benefit for oak trees through “predator satiation.” The idea goes like this: in a mast year, predators (chipmunks, squirrels, turkeys, blue jays, deer, bear, etc.) can’t eat all the acorns, so they leave some nuts to grow into future oak trees. Years of lean acorn production keep predator populations low, so there are fewer animals to eat all the seeds in a mast year. Ultimately, a higher proportion of nuts overall escape the jaws of hungry animals.

Whatever the reasons and mechanisms behind acorn cycles, mast years do have ecological consequences for years to come. More acorns, for example, may mean more deer and mice. Unfortunately, more deer and mice may mean more ticks and consequently more Lyme disease.

Many animals depend upon the highly nutritious acorn for survival. Oak trees, meanwhile, depend upon boom and bust cycles, and a few uneaten acorns, for theirs.

Amazing Acorn Facts

• There are about 90 species of oak in North America. All oaks produce acorns.
• Acorns belonging to trees in the red oak group take two growing seasons to mature; acorns in the white oak group mature in one season.
• Oak trees have greenish, inconspicuous female flowers and are wind pollinated.
• Oak trees of North America annually produce more nuts than all the region’s other nut trees together, wild and cultivated.
• One huge oak can drop up to 10,000 acorns in a mast year!
• Masting takes a lot of energy! Oak trees grow slowly in a mast year and grow well the year after.

Salem Climate Strike 2019: my photos, videos, commentary

Here's photos and videos I took at today's student-organized Salem Climate Strike event on the steps of the Capitol building, plus my commentary. Really inspiring to see so many young people standing up for preserving our one and only Earth for human habitation.

My book is a worst-seller. I'm fine with that.

I've written four books. My advice to people who want to ask an author, "How are your book sales going?," is the same advice I'd give to someone who wants to ask a woman how much she weighs. Don't do it!

Unless the author is Stephen King. Or the woman is Claudia Schiffer.

Five weeks ago I self-published my most recent book, Break Free of Dogma. (Amazon delicately calls it "Independently published," which does have a nicer ring to it.)

Currently my book ranks #2,098,091 on the Amazon best-seller list. 

At first glance that struck me as pretty damn low. But then I remembered that my book is called Break Free of Dogma, not Break Free of Rationalizing. 

So I just Googled the question, how many books does Amazon sell? I came across a wide variety of answers, so picked the highest number I could find: 58,407,108 as of December 1, 2016. There's got to be at least 60,000,000 now, so that puts me in the top 4%.

And if I bought a couple of copies of my own book, hey, I could easily make the top 2 million best-seller list.

My first book was published in 1995, though Amazon shows it in several places as 1765 for some reason. Back then, getting published was even more ego-deflating than it is now. 

I had to mail queries to dozens of potential publishers, then endure the agony of getting replies with painfully brief rejection notices. Such as "Thanks for your submission. It doesn't fit with our publishing plans. Not now. Not ever."

I eventually found a publisher who offered a pitifully low royalty and did next to nothing to promote the book. A spiritual organization I was a part of did buy thousands of copies for resale, but I got exactly zero royalties on all those books. 

Things are much more efficient now, thanks to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing. A writer can get a book published quickly at little cost, which means they can see how few copies of their book are being sold much more rapidly. Progress! 

It's always exciting to get that first printed copy of a book in the mail. I eagerly flip through the pages to see if it looks OK. At which point my eye hits upon a typo that went unrecognized even after several close readings of the manuscript. That marks the beginning of reality replacing fantasy.

I always think that people are going to flock to what I've written with as much zeal as I felt while composing the book. That fantasy would make sense if everybody was me. Sadly, they're not. 

A friend recently told me that he heard an author say, "I write books that I'd want to read." That resonates with me. I've been slowly reading through Break Free of Dogma. I love it. It's fashioned out of 93 posts from the early years of my Church of the Churchless blog, 2004-06.

I was struggling to make sense of the doubts I had about the spiritual path I'd been an ardent traveler on for 35 years. Re-reading what I wrote about some fifteen years ago made me realize how glad I am that I've made the jump to being spiritually independent.

As I note in the Introduction to my book, currently there have been about 4,600,000 page views on my Church of the Churchless blog. That's a lot. So I've had many readers, albeit ones who paid nothing to read what I've written. 

I don't write for money.

Few authors do. That's why book sales don't matter much to me. Sure, I'd be happier with more copies of my books being bought. But as with most things in life, satisfaction has to come with the doing, not with how others react to what's been done.

A quilter may spend a lot of time making a bedspread that few people ever will see. A jogger runs for the pleasure of exercising, not for the roar of a crowd at a finish line. A parent puts decades into raising a child, uncertain how their progeny will turn out, content simply to have done their parenting best.

I write because I like to write.

If someone enjoys what I've written, so much the better. However, if no one reacts to my literary product -- the number of Amazon reader reviews for Break Free of Dogma now stands at precisely zero -- my heart is mildly disappointed, yet in no way broken.

After all, I can always turn to Vincent Van Gogh. While there's some dispute about how many paintings he sold while alive, a reputable number is... one.

Thus Van Gogh serves as an exemplar for every person whose artistic expression wasn't recognized in their own time. I like to envision my book becoming a best-seller. Sure, it'd be nice to have this happen while I was alive. 

Which is why you should head to Amazon and buy a copy of Break Free of Dogma now, since there's a good chance I'll still be breathing when my sales ranking falls under the 2,000,000 mark, thanks to you and others. 

Just think: every person who buys a copy of my book assures that I've sold more books than Van Gogh sold paintings during his lifetime. I'm not saying that I'll cut off my ear if my book sales don't perk up. But wouldn't you feel bad if that happened? (I'd feel worse, of course.)

UPDATE: As chance would have it, right after publishing this blog post I came across a New York Times piece, "Steal This Book? There's a Price." It says:

Since 2009, when eBooks and book piracy became a phenomenon, income for full-time authors has declined 42 percent, according to Rasenberger, with the median income from writing now so low — just $6,080 a year — that poverty level looks like the mountaintop.

Wow.

Half of full time writers make less than $6,080 a year, while half make more. This makes me feel a bit better. Amazon sends me about $90 a month in royalties, so I'm hauling in a bit over a thousand dollars a year in my decidedly part-time book-writing "career." Which keeps me in occasional non-fat vanilla lattes, but not much else.

Here's another all-too-true excerpt from Richard Conniff's opinion piece.

I tried to explain: Authors need to eat, too, and we get by (or not quite, these days), by showing up at our writing places at a designated time day after day and staying there till we have fretted out our quota of words, to be sent off, after a time, to a publisher, in the hope that, two or three years down the road, a few pennies may come trickling back under the ludicrously grandiose name of “royalties.”

Fairview Woods approved by Salem City Council

It was good to see the Salem City Council vote unanimously last night to reject an appeal of the 14.1 acre, 16 lot Fairview Woods development. 

Eric Olsen of Olsen Design & Development has been working on this project for several years. The Woods currently is a heavily treed parcel at the top of the old Fairview Training Center property in south Salem. It's filled with ivy, blackberries, and trash left by homeless people and others.

As Olsen discussed at the City Council hearing (I watched via the City of Salem's Facebook feed), The Woods was a difficult design challenge. 

Olsen's Fairview Addition development basically surrounds The Woods. Olsen became interested in the 14 acres when he realized that the owners of the property wanted to develop it, and if he didn't do this, someone else would take control of The Woods and possibly do things with it that weren't desirable for the people who live in Fairview Addition.

So what he came up with was a way to save most of the trees and allow public access to the property by having only 16 lots on the 14 acres -- with the lot sizes ranging from .3 acre to 1.1 acre. Here's a map from the Fairview Woods Refinement Plan.
Download Fairview Woods Refinement Plan

The green dots are trees. The white rectangles are illustrative home sites. The black lines are the private roads in The Woods. Olsen explained that the roads need to be private because if they were public and built to City of Salem standards, their width would require many more trees to be removed, along with wrecking the look and feel of The Woods.

Olsen said that the roads will be shared by vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists, as narrow roads at the Black Butte Ranch and Sunriver resorts in central Oregon are. 

The large green area at the top of the curve of a road is a public Oak Park. 

Homeowners in The Woods only will be able to fence in 4,000 square feet of their lot, leaving the rest of the lot open for wildlife to meander through. A Homeowner's Association will help assure that no one cuts down trees unnecessarily. 

A central assertion of the person who filed the appeal of The Woods Refinement Plan that was the subject of last night's hearing was that the Master Plan for the Fairview property needed to be amended to make it compatible with the refinement plan.

But Councilor Tom Andersen, along with others, noted that aside from Pringle Creek Community, all of the development that has occurred on the Fairview property has deviated considerably from the original Master Plan.

Since my wife, Laurel, and I were members of Sustainable Fairview Associates during the time the Master Plan was being worked on, I know that this plan was a rather grandiose vision for the property, not a realistic blueprint for its development.

Laurel and I have been following goings-on at Fairview after we sold our shares in Sustainable Fairview Associates. Fairview Addition appealed to us enough to warrant putting down a deposit on two lots adjacent to The Woods, though we ended up deciding to stick with our non-easycare ten acres in rural south Salem for a while longer.

Now we're interested in Fairview Woods. It's tough to think of moving from where we are, but it's also difficult to envision us staying where we are for the rest of our lives, given that we're both now over 70 (not much over!).

Pleasingly, someone who lives in Fairview Addition testified last night that he surveyed other Fairview Addition residents about what they think of the plan for The Woods. I recall he said that 15 people responded, with 11 in favor of the Fairview Woods Refinement Plan, two neutral, and two opposed. 

The Morningside Neighborhood Association also approves of the plan for The Woods, albeit with some concerns that I believe have been addressed by Olsen Design & Development. 

I feel that Eric Olsen has done an excellent job of balancing the goal of preserving as many trees and as much open space as possible on the 14 acres, with the goal of having this development pencil out financially. My wife and I have talked with Olsen a number of times in recent years. I find him to be an honest, straightforward, caring,, creative developer -- the best kind.

Here's the tree preservation plan for The Woods. Being a proud tree-hugger, I like what I see.

Hopefully it won't be necessary to remove too many additional trees. In part this may happen because the location of the home sites shown on the map above are illustrative, not actual. Regardless, most developments in Salem preserve a much lower percentage of trees, being denser with wider roads.

VW's new electric ID3: appealing design and quirkiness

I'm already a big fan of the electric car VW revealed today at the Frankfurt auto show. Only problem, every report I've seen says that the ID3 won't be sold in the United States, because we Americans aren't big on smallish hatchbacks.

(Since I drive a 2017 VW Golf GTI, and love my car, I'm an exception.)

VW has done a great job with the design of the ID3. It honors the Golf heritage, while modernizing the look and feel of past VW vehicles. 

A Motor 1 story, "VW ID.3 Debuts As People's Electric Car With Up To 342-Mile Range," shows why Tesla has reason to worry about the ID3 (I refuse to use the period after "D") cannibalizing Model 3 sales.

The first of many EVs based on the modular MEB platform to arrive in the future, the ID.3 takes the shape of a traditional five-door hatchback with an autonomous range of up to 550 kilometers (342 miles) depending on the battery option. Production of the zero-emission vehicle begins in November this year and Volkswagen is proudly announcing more than 30,000 examples have already been pre-ordered.

...What’s probably way more important for the regular customers, Volkswagen promises to keep the price for the entry-level version below €30,000 in Germany, which translates to roughly $33,300 at the current rates. That second figure doesn’t mean the manufacturer will sell the EV in the United States but the I.D. Crozz electric SUV that will follow should be available at this side of the pond. What a shame we won't be getting the EV hatch in America.

Yes, it sure is a shame. What we'll be getting in the United States is the larger ID Crozz, which as I wrote about recently, could be my next car. As shown in the spy-shot below, the Crozz appears to have a similar shape to the ID3, just bigger.

I like the look and feel of the interior of the ID3. It has the clean, simple lines that I adore in my GTI, albeit with a much heavier dose of digital technology.

The display in front of the driver appears to have a crisp appearance.

The Motor 1 story includes the full VW press release for the ID3. There's a lot to like in it. Here's an appealingly quirky ID3 feature.

A further highlight of the matrix LED headlights is when drivers approach a parked ID.3 1ST, its headlights will briefly look at them and “flutter the eyelids”—friendly and with a human touch.

Earth to Politico: eating meat enlarges a person's carbon footprint

Having been a strict vegetarian since 1970, I've enjoyed almost fifty years of dietary self-satisfaction. (Vegetarians aren't as smug as vegans, but we're close.)

So when I saw a Politico headline today, "Democrats bite on burgers and straws -- and Republicans feast," I anticipated that the article was going to irritate me, which indeed it did.

Politico engaged in some questionable analysis of the lengthy CNN climate forum featuring Democratic presidential candidates. Here's some burger-related observations.

Democrats’ verbal targeting of everything from plastic straws to cheeseburgers is stoking fears among anti-Trump forces that they’re unwittingly playing into Republican culture wars.

...Andrew Yang, in the same [GOP] web ad, said, “We’re going to be OK if the vast majority of the world goes vegetarian immediately.”

“I just don’t even know what to do with ‘Burgergate,’” said Colin Strother, a veteran Democratic strategist from the cattle-rearing state of Texas. “It is such a fringe position that is out of step with an overwhelming majority of Americans — and let us not forget that a pretty wide swath of the country including Texas and the ‘Breadbasket’ are major beef producers.

Well, the plain fact is that eating meat, especially beef, results in much higher carbon emissions than a vegetarian diet.

Here's part of an answer to a question in the August 17, 2019 issue of New Scientist that asked, "From an environmental perspective, is it better to eat imported foods like tofu, quinoa and sweet potato or beef from the farm a few kilometers up the road?

This question is easy to resolve. In a paper in Nature last year, a team led by Timothy Searchinger of Princeton University examined the impact of various foodstuffs in terms of carbon. This shows that protein from beef is 73 times worse than protein from soya.

A kilogram [2.2 pounds] of beef protein has the equivalent carbon emissions of a passenger flying from London to New York and back. The overall carbon cost of a kilogram of beef protein is equivalent to 1250 kg of CO2. Aircraft emissions for long haul flights are roughly 110 grams per passenger per kilometre, and the return distance is 11,170 km -- so 1229 kg of CO2.

However, there are caveats. That's the way of science: things are complex. A simple answer may be true -- beef is much more carbon intensive than tofu -- yet needs some explication. Here's part of what I found via a dive into Google's response to "eating meat carbon emissions."

It's a myth that going vegan or vegetarian is the key to fighting global warming. So says Skeptical Science. (Tagline: Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism.)

Animal agriculture is responsible for 13–18% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions globally, and less in developed countries (e.g. 3% in the USA).  Fossil fuel combustion for energy and transportation is responsible for approximately 64% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions globally, and more in developed countries (e.g. 80% in the USA).

...So, animal agriculture and meat consumption are significant contributors to global warming, but far less so than fossil fuel combustion.  Moreover, fossil fuels are an even bigger contributor to the problem in developed countries, which use more energy and have increased livestock production efficiency.

Still, switching from beef to chicken, or better, tofu, reduces dietary carbon a lot. So says a National Geographic story.

Replacing the carbon-heavy beef on your plate with carbon-light chicken will cut your dietary carbon footprint a shocking amount: in half. That’s according to a first-ever national study of U.S. eating habits and their carbon footprints.

...The evidence is clear regarding the need to shift diets to less meat and more plant-based proteins for both health and environmental reasons, says study co-author Martin Heller of the University of Michigan Center for Sustainable Systems at the School for Environment and Sustainability.

Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on our planet. So says a The Guardian story based on research published in the journal Science. 

Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet, according to the scientists behind the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage farming does to the planet.

The new research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% – an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined – and still feed the world. Loss of wild areas to agriculture is the leading cause of the current mass extinction of wildlife.

The new analysis shows that while meat and dairy provide just 18% of calories and 37% of protein, it uses the vast majority – 83% – of farmland and produces 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. Other recent research shows 86% of all land mammals are now livestock or humans. The scientists also found that even the very lowest impact meat and dairy products still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing.

...The analysis also revealed a huge variability between different ways of producing the same food. For example, beef cattle raised on deforested land result in 12 times more greenhouse gases and use 50 times more land than those grazing rich natural pasture. But the comparison of beef with plant protein such as peas is stark, with even the lowest impact beef responsible for six times more greenhouse gases and 36 times more land.

So while Republican deniers of global warming can joke all they want about Democrats wanting to ban burgers, science has the last laugh. Meat-eating isn't good for the planet.

VW's ID4 Crozz could be my next (electric) car

I've been car window-shopping recently. OK, not via a window, really, but through the Internet.

Just when I thought I'd hold onto my 2017 VW GTI for a while, until the next-generation Mk8 Golf/GTI comes to the United States in 2020 as a 2021 model, today I decided to take a closer look at VW's electric vehicles that will be introduced at the Frankfurt Auto Show this month.

My new idea is that I could keep my GTI for longer trips, such as when I go to our co-owned Black Butte Ranch house in central Oregon. Then my wife and I could use an electric car for around town and shorter trips.

Yes, we recently sold our leased Chevy Volt after Laurel found that she enjoyed driving our 2020 RAV4 Hybrid considerably more than the Volt, making the Volt a superfluous third car for us.

Plus, I never liked to drive the Volt very much. It felt too confined to me, lacking a moonroof and large side/rear windows -- which made reliance on the blind spot alert a must, given the poor visibility to the sides and rear.

This afternoon I got excited when I read that the ID3 was going to be featured by VW at the Frankfurt Auto Show. It looks very much like a Golf, so until I read some stories more closely, I thought it would be possible to get an electric ID3 that would have the shape and size of my much-beloved Golf GTI.

But as often happens when I get enthused about a car that strikes my fancy, it didn't take long for me to realize that VW isn't going to sell the ID3 in the United States -- for reasons unknown. 

However, it appears that VW will be selling a somewhat larger ID4 known as the Crozz in this country, probably in 2020. Initially I was led to a 2017 Crozz concept car story which showed a vehicle that looked disappointingly akin to the "fastback" shape of the Chevy Volt. 

Which isn't very dog-friendly. My wife had to convert the rear seat of the three Volts we've leased into a place our dog could ride, since the steeply slanting rear compartment makes it difficult for any medium or large dog to sit up or stand comfortably.

But then I came across an August 2019 Motor Authority spy shot of a Crozz in camouflage being driven out in the wild in Europe. It looks to me like a somewhat elongated version of the current Golf, and the ID3.

Since the ID model numbers reflect how large a car is, it makes sense that the ID4 Crozz would be bigger than the ID3 -- which could be why it will be the first VW ID model sold in the United States. Americans tilt toward larger cars. I like the size of my GTI just fine, but if a Crozz was a little bit bigger, that'd be fine with me also.

Little is known about the Crozz at this point. However, this speculation in the Motor Authority story sounds good to me.

As for specs, the ID Crozz concept pointed to a setup delivering 302 horsepower, all-wheel drive and a range of 300 miles. This probably reflects a range-topping variant, though. A base model could come with only front-wheel drive and less power and range.

The ID3 is going to be rear-wheel drive. A 2018 Motor Trend story says that all VW electric vehicles will be rear-wheel drive or AWD. But I suppose a front-wheel drive Crozz is a possibility. I like how my front-wheel drive GTI handles, but I'm sure I'd enjoy the Crozz no matter how the wheels are propelled.

Hopefully VW will share some news about the Crozz at the Frankfurt Auto Show. If not, I'm leaning toward keeping my GTI and seeing what VW has in store for 2020 here in the United States.

So why not get a Tesla, I can imagine Tesla owners asking. Good question. Here's a few answers.

First, I like the idea of getting an electric car from a company that has lots of actual dealerships. Electric cars have problems. Not as many as gas-powered cars, but quite a few. We had problems with an all-electric Nissan Leaf that we bought, and we've had problems with the mostly electric Chevy Volts we've leased. 

Second, a hatchback appeals to us. The Tesla Model 3 is a sedan. The Model Y will be a hatchback, but it isn't available yet. And almost certainly a VW ID will cost less than a comparable Tesla. Sure, at the moment Tesla is ahead when it comes to autonomous or mostly autonomous driving.

However, VW has more resources than Tesla. I could be wrong, but I suspect that VW and other car companies stressing electric vehicles will be coming close to what Tesla offers, feature-wise, before too long.

Lastly, I've got some concerns about Tesla's longevity as a company. Probably it will survive and become profitable. The electric car risk just seems less with an established company like VW.