[Gas Prices]
Calculating Your Price per Mile
Whenever gas prices spike, people do bizarre things, like sit in their car idling for 20 minutes just to buy gas that's five cents lower than the rest of the city. Whinging about price fluctuations among the states rises. And people even consider a slightly more sophisticated figure related to gas prices--their price per tank.
But the big difference is in your price per mile. If your car gets, say 30 mpg, then it costs you roughly ten cents a mile to travel around the city at $3 a gallon. But if you're in a 15-mpg SUV, you're spending twenty cents. Over 10,000 miles--the average one American drives a year--that begins to add up. For the 30 mpg Civic, a year's gas costs you $1,000. For the 17 mpg Ford Mustang, a year's gas is $1765.
I thus offer the following table, showing the price of gas for one year for several models of cars, at different prices of gas (these are 2005 model year mpg, not actual mpg).
Car (mpg)__________ $2.50/gal__ $3.00/gal___$3.50/gal
Toyota Prius (55)_____$454________$545________$636
VW Jetta Diesel (42)__$595________$714________$833
Honda Civic (30) _____$833_______$1000________$1167
Chevy Malibu (22)_____$909_______$1363________$1590
GMC Yukon (16)________$1562______$1870________$2188
Ford Explorer (11)____$2272______$2727________$3181
Not that we're on the way to $3.50 a gallon or anything. Or are we?!?
3 comments:
i figure i'm shelling out about $430 a year...
Just bought a Jeep Liberty that runs on biodiesel. It gets 19 mpg city and 23 mpg road - in real practice.
At 20 mpg overall average, we're running about 15 cents a mile. 10,000 miles is $1500.
But here's the thing: That $1500 stays right here because we're buying biodiesel made in Oregon.
From a 'buy local' perspective, that's money better spent -- even compared to a Prius that gets triple the mileage, but sends all its money to multinational oil companies and anti-democratic nations.
Full disclosure: my wife and I drive a '97 Civic that's still getting a little better than 30 mpg, but we only put about 7,000 miles on it a year (it's got less than 65k total). So we're spending something like $650 collectively.
And Kari, you're right on that one. We're thinking of buying a new car and the Jetta I referenced, at 42 mpg, is getting serious attention. That'd be a sharp improvement on mileage, we'd quit contributing greenhouse gasses, and we'd be unplugging ourselves from the Saudi teat. Though I don't think that's the trifect Bush once referenced.
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