While you will save over a gas car by leasing a Tesla Model S, you'll only save if it's a comparable luxury gas car, and the check you'll be cutting Tesla Motors is going to be around $1,100 per month -- hardly an affordable sum for the majority of Americans.

I recently wrote an entry in which I ran the numbers for us on a $500 per month Tesla Model S lease. Unfortunately, it turns out that's a phantom lease, one that's reduced my respect for Tesla quite a bit. In fact, I've written dozens of articles and blog entries about Tesla in the past three years and never once written anything negative -- until now.

Why am I so steamed?

Because I -- and I bet I'm not the only one -- naively thought, when I first read about the $500 Model S lease that I, and you, and everyone else, could actually get into a Model S and cut a check to Tesla for just $500 per month.

Bueller, it just ain't so!

If you can lease a Model S and truly cut a monthly check for just $500 to Tesla in order to do so, we could afford a Model S -- if we dropped from being a two-car household to a one-car household.

So, Tesla’s trying to make things more interesting for folks who would love to have a Model S, but who clearly are not in the right income bracket to buy one -- that would be us -- with a lease deal it’s offering via a partnership with U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo.

I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty details here, or into a long discussion about whether Tesla’s pushing “fuzzy” math by including too many different variables in its monthly lease cost calculator (though, now that I’ve played with the calculator a bit more, unfortunately, after having already written this entry, I think the calculator is highly misleading, even bogus).

Instead of dwelling on the bogus-ness of what appears to be a phantom $500 monthly lease for the Model S, I’m going to fantasize about us actually getting into a Tesla Model S for $500 a month, and, allegedly, no money down (Tesla says the Federal/State tax credits go toward a down payment on the Model S).

A new survey shows more and more people are texting/surfing while driving, and it's adults, not teens, who are the biggest problems.

I’ve written frequently about the texting/surfing while driving epidemic (‘Texting and driving like playing Russian roulette’; ‘Time to put brakes on texting & driving epidemic’; ‘Don’t text and die’; ‘Computerized cars answer to texting epidemic’).

And, without fail, I never get a single comment on those entries.

It’s as if the life and death issue of texting/surfing while driving -- clearly it is a matter of life and death, both for the selfish, short-sighted people who do it, anyone in their vehicle, and anyone in a vehicle around them -- doesn’t matter to anyone.

Or maybe people who read this blog think texting/surfing while driving is irrelevant to solar-charged driving, though, it very definitely is relevant: Someone who texts/surfs while driving a solar-charged electric car is just as much of a disaster waiting to kill/maim/injure someone as a texting/surfing gasoline car driver.

So, why am I so fired up, again, about texting/surfing and driving? The lead story in today’s USA Today is about texting/surfing while driving.

Peter Charles' documentary, Zeitgeist: Moving forward, calls for socal change far beyond individuals driving around in solar-charged electric vehicles, a solution that, while it would result in virtually no pollution, would not rid us of the massive traffic jams that plague modern society.

So, I haven't posted anything to SolarChargedDriving.Com in about a week. I'll confess part of this is the fact that I've lost some of my solar-charged 'mojo' after 3 1/2 years of doing this site and still having only home solar but no EV.

I don't have an EV to add to our 5.59 kW worth of solar PV here in sunny Aurora, Colo., because we're likely going to be in Germany from August 2013 to August 2014, and it made no sense to buy, or lease, an EV (which have been available for a bit over a year in Colorado) when we knew we were going to be away for awhile.

But simply because I've lost some of my mojo here on SolarChargedDriving.Com -- in my own defense, there are more than 1,200 entries and stories on the site, many of which are still completely timely, relevant and helpful to those still discovering solar-charged driving -- doesn't mean I'm still not surfing about on the Internet, spreading my own brand of environmental and EV + PV activism ;-)