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We never say this before. Max, the one to watch for a good scream with Cricket. Yeah! Phone plan, streams, and standard definition. Programming subject to change. Fees, terms, and restrictions apply. Visit CricketWireless.com for details. From time to time we all come across a hot tip. Now a lot of times this might be a hot stock tip, so let me give you a little bit of advice about those.

Don't participate. Seriously. Generally, they're a bad idea. But sometimes there are hot tips that can come along that are timely and can be useful. Today I want to share with you one specific hot tip that I see right out there in the marketplace that's available for you to take advantage of right now.

Now I don't know how long this will be available, so this is one of those types of tips that may be short-lived in duration. As I record this, it's Tuesday, October 18, 2016. But it'll be at least available for a while. And if it's not available when you're listening to this in the long future, then you can just simply look for something similar.

But the deal is this. A specific car, which if you are shopping for a new car, I think you should consider. And that car is the second generation 2017 Chevy Volt. Let me explain to you why. Yesterday I did a show on gas mileage and how to actually calculate cars and the gas mileage and how much that's going to save you.

If you listened to that show, and if you didn't, you should. But if you listened to that show, what you learned was that you need to actually calculate the cost of a new vehicle and actually calculate how long it will take you to break even on gas. Generally, it's almost never a good idea to upgrade your vehicle simply because it'll save you money on gas.

However, we do have to upgrade our vehicles from time to time for various reasons. And when you're choosing a new vehicle, you might as well go for the best option that you can get. If you have a choice between a vehicle that gets great gas mileage and a vehicle that gets very poor gas mileage, there's no reason not to choose the vehicle that gets great gas mileage.

So although I recommended in yesterday's show you need to calculate it, that advice was not meant to imply that you can never upgrade your vehicle. There are many very compelling reasons why from time to time you may need to upgrade your vehicle. This will largely depend on your need for transportation, the type of life that you're living, and the circumstances of your life.

The vehicle that I want you to consider is a 2017 Chevy Volt. I've always been interested in the electric car marketplace and the hybrid marketplace. Years ago, I first got exposed to the first generation Honda Insight, which to this day is well-loved among those who are into hypermiling and getting maximum fuel economy out of their vehicle.

But it was not well-loved by the marketplace. And that's kind of the story of the electric car marketplace. And by electric car, I'm summing up here electric cars and hybrids, etc. The technology for electric cars has been around for a very long time. And although the older versions weren't as good as they are now, of course, they were still serviceable.

But they weren't quite ready for consumer prime time. But a lot of those things are changing significantly. The biggest disruptor that I've seen in the marketplace was the Toyota Prius. Toyota Prius is a massively popular car. And it's a tremendously great choice of car. And to this day, I think it's probably one of the best family cars.

If you're buying a family car, you should seriously consider a Toyota Prius, especially if you drive a lot. But the Toyota Prius is not the only game in town. There's a big move toward other electric cars that's happening right now. The Nissan Leaf had -- and the reason I'm talking about this is because when a new car comes in, the manufacturers are trying to get people to change to a new technology.

And the way this works when they're introducing a new product to the marketplace is sometimes in order to be able to introduce it, they've got to introduce it at a cost that is below what the market value -- market cost should actually be. So a couple of examples. Tesla.

Right now, Tesla is doing all kinds of business in terms of sales. But if my information is correct, and I believe it is, they don't -- still aren't making money. They still lose money on the vehicles. Because they're selling them probably cheaper than they should be to get them out there in the marketplace.

Similar things have been done in the past. One that I know specifically this happened on was the first generation Chevrolet Volt. Chevrolet was selling it at a much cheaper cost than they should have in order to get it out there. And we'll get to its benefits and drawbacks in a moment.

But I looked very seriously a number of years ago at the Nissan Leaf. And when I was looking at it, Nissan was offering some extremely inexpensive lease deals where they were selling the cars for substantially below what they should have been going for. And this happens from time to time.

If a manufacturer doesn't have a product that's moving properly, they'll subsidize the cost. Now, when you come into the world of electric cars and hybrids, the other thing that you should consider is the cost might be subsidized from tax subsidies. And so sometimes when you start layering manufacturer subsidies onto tax subsidies, you can get a substantial discount on a vehicle.

And you can have a vehicle that is very new, very modern. It's a well-performing vehicle. And I see that opportunity right now with the Chevrolet Volt. And I want some of you who are shopping or are in the marketplace for a car like this to be aware of it.

Now, let me describe to you the Chevy Volt if you're not familiar with it. The Chevy Volt is a really fantastic technology because although it's classified as what's called a plug-in hybrid, it's better than many of the other hybrid cars. When you have a hybrid, you have a combination of an electric vehicle and a gasoline vehicle.

I'm just going to stick with the very simple gas and electric for this sake. There are other types of fuels that can be used for the combustion engine side of it. But for now, it's just going to say gas and electric. In most plug-in -- in most hybrid vehicles, let's use the Toyota Prius as an example, most hybrid vehicles, you have an electric motor, a battery pack, and a small gas engine.

And the gas engine and the electric motor work together to propel the car forward. The Prius, when you're driving it, you can drive it at relatively low speeds completely on battery power. When you stop at a stoplight, it turns off and it goes on to battery power. All of the systems in the car are run off of electrical power.

So this makes it an effective vehicle. But when you are trying to accelerate or when you're driving at highway speeds, you're going to be running the gasoline engine as your primary means of power for conveying you down the road. And if you really need power, the gasoline engine and the electric motors work together.

But in these types of hybrids, the gasoline engine is dominant. It's the primary source of power and the electric system is supplementary. Now, when you move to what's called a plug-in hybrid, you have a car here which has an expanded battery pack and it has expanded electric motors. And so the idea is the car can be plugged in, but it still has that gasoline system.

And so you can buy a plug-in Prius or other models from other manufacturers and these cars are designed to be plugged in and they're designed to be electric only for a relatively limited range. And that range usually winds up being somewhere between 10 and 20 miles. And then at that point in time, it switches over to the original gas engine, electric engine, just like all the rest of them do.

Because the range is so limited, that means that really, although you can, if you have a very short commute, you can move yourself on electric power, you are probably going to wind up running out of electric only range and moving into where you have a gasoline engine as your primary source of fuel.

Still a great car, still gets you 50 miles per gallon in the case of a plug-in Prius, but it's not truly, doesn't have the electrical ability as dominant. Well, the new generation to 2017 Chevrolet Volt has a substantially improved range, has a range of about 50 miles on the electric only motor.

That's fantastic. And that is class leading in the plug-in hybrid. It means that the vast majority of you listening to my voice right now, if using a car like this, would be able to commute, do your daily commute on electric power only. And electric power is substantially cheaper than the cost of gasoline when figuring out how to get your car down the road.

No matter where you live, it's cheaper than the cost of gasoline. And for many of us who experience very low power costs, it is much, much cheaper. Some of you who live in high power states, it's not quite as compelling, but most of us, it is much, much cheaper.

I actually at the moment don't have a computer, so I couldn't check the exact statistic, but my computer crashed on me this morning and it's at the repair person's shop right now. But I believe it's less, usually considered to be less than about 25% of the cost of gas, even if you're paying for it.

We'll come back to even if you're paying for it in a moment. I'll tell you how you can actually drive for free when considering the cost of the fuel. That 50-mile range is substantial, but what makes it so much better and so much more practical is that when you reach the end of that 50-mile range, by the way, there are other electric-only cars that have a longer range.

I think the Nissan Leaf has a range approaching 100 miles. The Tesla is somewhere around that as well. So there are electric cars that have that longer range. But when you reach the end of that range, the Chevy Volt has a gasoline engine that goes with it. But here's the key differentiator.

The gasoline engine in the Chevy Volt is a generator, not an engine that drives the car. It does run on gasoline, but what its function is is to charge the batteries, which are still responsible for moving you down the road. In that design, the electrical system is still primary, but you have a backup.

You have a built-in generator in the car that runs on gasoline. That means unlike an electric-only car where you have to stop and do a recharge from an electric power station, which is still, even if you have a high-voltage electrical station to use, is still much slower than just pumping a tank of gas and hitting the road again, you have unlimited range because you have that gasoline backup.

This makes the car very, very practical. You get many of the great things of an electric-only car. You get that fantastic range. You get the ability to plug it in in your garage every night. You get the ability for most of you will have less than a 50-mile round-trip commute on a daily basis.

You have the ability to just simply do that all on electrical power, which can save you substantial dollars in your gas bill. And you have that backup gas generator. So if all of a sudden at the end of the day you're at your 50-mile range, but you get called out of town, well, you can take the car cross-country just like any other car.

It's extremely, extremely practical. Now, the challenge is what's the cost? Well, here's one of the major benefits. Chevy, as I understand it, based upon the press right now, Chevy has substantially discounted the cost of this car. And the base model of the Chevy Volt comes in with a suggested price of about $33,000.

And if you go up to the luxury trim, it winds up being up to about $37,000. So between $30,000 to $40,000. Obviously, you can buy cars cheaper than this. But it's very hard -- forgive me. Let's try again. It's very hard -- sorry, I don't have my normal pause button.

It's very hard to find a vehicle that can run on electric power like this and have that gasoline backup in that price range. Now, you will have to run the numbers for your situation. But if you're considering buying a car and you're considering buying a newer car, you should seriously consider buying one of these new Chevy Volts.

Because when you can eliminate a majority of your gas costs, that can substantially change the pricing spectrum. Now, here's the other great news with regard to the cost of fuel. On electric-only power, your actual -- they have a couple of interesting ways they measure this. I think Chevy rates this as getting an MPG of 106 -- they do this little thing called the MPGE for electric vehicles -- 106 miles per gallon.

So set aside electric because that's too complicated to explain right now. Just on gas, the car is rated to get about 42 miles per gallon. So even if you don't have the benefit of a charging station or charging it up from your house, you still get a 42-mile-per-gallon car.

And this price is really, really substantially low. Plug that into your gas calculator and figure out if this type of car would make sense for you. When you get a company that's selling a car at a loss -- and why do they do this? I don't know. I don't fully understand.

I think they've got to establish their street cred with the greenies. I think it helps them to hit the company MPG calculations, all the EPA stuff of how much they need to do it. It's a new technology, and they're trying to get it out there in the marketplace. And once consumer demand changes, then I think it'll be -- you know, they'll start to change.

I don't know why. But the point is I think the car is cheaper than it should be, and that can be to your advantage. It could be a great way to save money. The thing can charge up somewhere from 8 to 12 hours to do a full charge. Let's talk about charging.

So I've driven the first-generation Chevy Volt, and a lot of people didn't like it. I don't get that. I have a family member who has one. He's a young man, and he's a pilot. So he's not exactly an old fogey like me who drives along at the speed limit and just doesn't really care if his vehicle goes -- as long as it gets me down the road, I'm pretty happy.

He's not. He's a pilot. He drives jets, corporate jets for a living. And he has one of these things, and he loves it. But he's got a pretty sweet deal in a couple of ways. The sweet deal is he lives in a condo, and in the garage, he parks it up and charges it up in the garage overnight.

But that electricity is not separately metered to him. So he's charging it practically, essentially, for free. Certainly his share is included in the building costs and the building management. But he's not being required to pay extra metered electricity for plugging his car up. He can plug it into any standard household outlet, and it'll charge up slowly, but it charges up for free.

Secondly, they have a large number of charging stations, and he can do the same thing at his work. And more and more at office buildings, you start to see these, there are more and more public charging stations where you can charge up for free. And it's really -- you can drive for -- at least in cost of fuel, for practically free.

So you range anywhere from cheap to free. That makes a big difference on the costs. The thing about driving the car, I've driven his. The thing drives awesome. It's fun to drive. Electric motors, if you've never driven an electric car, are fantastic because they provide full instant torque. There's no spooling up of the engine and speeding up until you finally get the power to the engine.

So they're either just on or off. And that's why the Tesla and some of these cars are so fun to drive, because of the power of electric motors. Think of it as your blender. It's just on. You turn it on and turn it off. Electric motors are tremendously fantastic.

And so his -- the first generation one was fast. The new one is rated for a zero to 60 time of about seven seconds. So it's like low seven seconds. That is, in my opinion, that is fast. To put it in context, a very fast sports car gets a zero to 60 time in about threes to fours, depending on the vehicle.

A Corvette is probably -- I haven't looked at Corvettes in a decade, but they're probably in that four-second range, maybe a little bit above. These cars are fast, and they're effective. So if you're in the market for a car, you should seriously consider this. This is a four-seat car.

It's a four-seat car. It's a four-seat car. It's a four-seat car. It's a four-seat car. It's a four-seat car. It's a four-seat car. It's a four-seat car. It's a four-seat car. It's a four-seat car. It's a four-seat car. It's a four-seat car. It's a four-seat car. It's a four-seat car.

It's a four-seat car. It's a four-seat car. It's a four-seat car. It's a four-seat car. It's a four-seat car. It's a four-seat car. It's a four-seat car. It's a four-seat car. Obviously, it would be a new car. And so, for many of you, that doesn't make sense. For someone like me, in my current situation, I don't drive very much.

And if I do drive, I'm going to have my whole family with me, which is when I'm going to want to drive the minivan. But for somebody – so for me, it makes no sense to go out and buy a new car because I just don't have the need for it.

But if I were in a different situation where I was driving, and especially if I were in the type of business or work where I needed to drive a nicer car, people judge you by your car. Whether they should or shouldn't doesn't matter. The point is they do. So, in some occupations, it's a big deal what kind of car you drive.

If I were back in one of those occupations, if I were back in the world of financial planning, I think sometimes if radical personal finance doesn't work out, I have backup plans. I'd probably go work in a family office here in Palm Beach and just work with a single family or a couple of rich families.

In that type of situation, I wouldn't drive my little $500 Corolla. It just doesn't make sense. It's a massive liability. So, when you're in a situation where you're making six figures, a couple six figures, you want to drive something that's respectable. But there's no need to spend a ton of money on it.

And you can find these in-between, not easily categorized cars, and they'll fit that problem. So, if I were back in the world of financial advice, I would seriously consider buying a Volt. It's a perfect car. It slips right through the middle. Nobody judges it as being too nice, not too nice.

You can get the luxury package, and the thing is super nice. And it's really, really practical. It's effective. It's efficient. It's cost-effective. It's just a really, really great in-between car where it looks fancier than it costs. It's not one of those things where somebody's judging you because you're driving a BMW 1 Series or a 3 Series instead of the 5 Series, and you've got to ramp up an extra $5,000.

It's that in-between categorized, in-between categories of cars. I think it's really worth considering. Now, there are risks with electric vehicles. The risk is, a big risk is the battery pack. Battery packs will fail over time. I have been impressed with how long they are lasting now, and I expect them just to get better and better and better.

But you do need to do your research. Do your research on the reliability, but I have very high hopes for it. So, if you're in the market for a new car, look for -- consider looking for a 2017 or newer Chevy Volt. Try to get them while they are relatively inexpensive.

I don't know. I haven't gone down to my local Chevrolet dealership and actually looked at it to see if they can actually get these things in at these prices. I haven't done that level of research. I've just read the press reports, and I'm familiar with the concept, and I know this happens from time to time.

If you're hearing this and if the Chevy Volt isn't the key, look for whatever it is in the future because from time to time, every few years, there usually winds up being one of these models, one maker that's trying to break into a new market. And look in your area to see if there are subsidies available that you can stack on.

Many of those subsidies have been used up by now as far as the electric vehicle subsidies. But do your own research in your own area, and hopefully, this hot tip may be useful to you.