June 08, 2004

Basic Math

I'd like to talk about the actual cost of gasoline as a component of your overall transportation costs for a moment, if I may.

Using my basic yardstick (which is surprisingly easy to do. Imagine that!):

If you drive 25,000 miles a year, and your vehicle gets 25 miles to the gallon, you will use approximately a thousand gallons of fuel in your vehicle each year.

Therefore, an increase of one dollar a gallon will cost you a thousand dollars extra. Is that really such a large burden to bear? Considering you're also already shelling out at least another $2,500 in payments and/or maintenance, and another $500 - $2,000 in insurance costs. And I am being very generous with those numbers - in the metro Detroit area, you wouldn't be buying much car with that kind of coinage.

Of course, the fuel costs would be quite different depending on a couple of variables:

driving a gaz-guzzler vs. a gas-sipper; and
driving significantly more or less miles per year than I used in my example. By way of comparison, a typical lease is 15,000 miles, which is 3/5 of the mileage in my example.

And that's pretty much all of the choices available as of this writing (where are the flying cars? They promised that we would have flying cars!). It would be nice to have a new source of motive power that could replace the internal combustion engine in our society...

Posted by (: Tom :) at June 8, 2004 10:41 PM