2008 Woodie Awards
Metaphor for gas consumption can be illuminating, even without change
Scott Stewart
Issue date: 5/2/08 Section: Opinion
I drive an '88 Volvo 740 station wagon, and lately I've been wondering how horribly fuel inefficient my vehicle is.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, at fueleconomy.gov, my car gets an average of 20 miles per gallon, if it's well maintained. It estimates the cost to drive 25 miles at $4.24.
Rather than trust numbers like these, though, I decided to start watching my trip odometer.
After a couple weeks, including a round trip to Lincoln to visit a friend, I figured I could go about 220 miles on a tank of gas, which set me back $40 paying roughly $3.60 a gallon, the recent norm it seems for regular unleaded. (My Volvo doesn't perform that well on the ethanol mix, either.)
By the way, that puts my car at approximately $4.55 for a 25 mile drive, meaning I'm probably getting only 17 or 18 miles per gallon.
Being a bit of a math nerd, I estimated that I was paying a couple pennies for every 10th of a mile on my odometer, or roughly a penny every five seconds going 45 miles per hour.
Then, it finally hit me: my car was consuming gasoline at a rate comparable to a penny squishing machine at a tourist attraction.
This got me wondering how my station wagon measured up to other vehicles, and I remembered that the Omaha World-Herald recently featured UNO's Director of Institutional Research Linda Mannering and her 2004 Toyota Prius.
Mannering commutes to Lincoln every workday, adding up to at least 2,000 miles per month - probably easily more, with grocery shopping or any other non-work-related trips. Roughly speaking, then, Mannering is paying no more than 8.75 cents per mile, given the numbers she provided the World-Herald.
For the sake of comparison, I'm paying somewhere around 18 to 20 cents per mile, which makes sense since the Prius makes a little better than twice my MPG - 48 city and 45 highway, compared to my measly 18-or-so average.
Figuring these numbers out gave me a new perspective on how I'm personally contributing to such social issues as global climate change, the rising cost of petroleum and even issues like the war in Iraq, which I - as many others do - believe was started primarily over oil.
Of course, like a normal college student who just realized his own impact, I'm not planning to change my habits anytime soon. In fact, since I plan to move back to Bellevue this summer, I expect my driving expenses only to continue to increase.
Nevertheless, finding a visual metaphor for how much gasoline my car is consuming really helped me better understand the cost of transportation these days. (After all, I'm only 21 years old, and I still remember when a $20 bill was sufficient to fill my tank.)
I would encourage everyone who doesn't really know how much their driving costs to get out a calculator and figure out how much their habits really cost. Your results might be surprising.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, at fueleconomy.gov, my car gets an average of 20 miles per gallon, if it's well maintained. It estimates the cost to drive 25 miles at $4.24.
Rather than trust numbers like these, though, I decided to start watching my trip odometer.
After a couple weeks, including a round trip to Lincoln to visit a friend, I figured I could go about 220 miles on a tank of gas, which set me back $40 paying roughly $3.60 a gallon, the recent norm it seems for regular unleaded. (My Volvo doesn't perform that well on the ethanol mix, either.)
By the way, that puts my car at approximately $4.55 for a 25 mile drive, meaning I'm probably getting only 17 or 18 miles per gallon.
Being a bit of a math nerd, I estimated that I was paying a couple pennies for every 10th of a mile on my odometer, or roughly a penny every five seconds going 45 miles per hour.
Then, it finally hit me: my car was consuming gasoline at a rate comparable to a penny squishing machine at a tourist attraction.
This got me wondering how my station wagon measured up to other vehicles, and I remembered that the Omaha World-Herald recently featured UNO's Director of Institutional Research Linda Mannering and her 2004 Toyota Prius.
Mannering commutes to Lincoln every workday, adding up to at least 2,000 miles per month - probably easily more, with grocery shopping or any other non-work-related trips. Roughly speaking, then, Mannering is paying no more than 8.75 cents per mile, given the numbers she provided the World-Herald.
For the sake of comparison, I'm paying somewhere around 18 to 20 cents per mile, which makes sense since the Prius makes a little better than twice my MPG - 48 city and 45 highway, compared to my measly 18-or-so average.
Figuring these numbers out gave me a new perspective on how I'm personally contributing to such social issues as global climate change, the rising cost of petroleum and even issues like the war in Iraq, which I - as many others do - believe was started primarily over oil.
Of course, like a normal college student who just realized his own impact, I'm not planning to change my habits anytime soon. In fact, since I plan to move back to Bellevue this summer, I expect my driving expenses only to continue to increase.
Nevertheless, finding a visual metaphor for how much gasoline my car is consuming really helped me better understand the cost of transportation these days. (After all, I'm only 21 years old, and I still remember when a $20 bill was sufficient to fill my tank.)
I would encourage everyone who doesn't really know how much their driving costs to get out a calculator and figure out how much their habits really cost. Your results might be surprising.
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