Compare Fuel Savings Between Cars
To combat the inevitable rise in gasoline prices, one thing you can do is get a car with better gas mileage than the one you have now. That's what I did recently, and frankly, the savings is astounding.
The old car was a 2002 Pontiac Grand Prix. Gas mileage: 27 mpg.
The new car is a 2007 Honda Civic Hybid. Gas mileage: 60 mpg.
The old Grand Prix served me well for 150,000 miles. In the time that I owned it, the price of gas tripled, rising from $1.00 per gallon to $3.00 per gallon. Will gas triple again in the next five years? That's anybody's guess, but it seems likely to me. For the sake of conservative estimating, let's not make any assumptions about a rising gas price. Let's just figure it will stay at $3. Over a 150,000 mile lifespan, how do the fuel costs compare between the Honda Hybrid and the Grand Prix? There is a whopping $9,100 savings with the Honda! That amounts to approximately half the price of the car!
Here is a Fuel Savings Comparator to help you compare various scenarios. It loads as a pop-up window, so you may need to change settings in your browser to make it work. Enter the gas mileage for two cars. Fill in the average price you expect to pay for gas over the period of time it will take to drive the miles you input for "Total Miles." Every time you change a value in a box and then click outside the box, the calculator will recompute the fuel costs, fuel savings, and CO2 emissions. CO2 emissions are based on an estimate of 20 pounds of CO2 per gallon of gas burned.
To compare two cars over their total life expectancy, put in a Total Miles figure that will reflect the life of the car. Use the calculator to figure fuel cost and CO2 levels for short trips, too, by changing Total Miles to the distance traveled on your trip.
Even without one of the super efficient hybrids a conventional car with more modest mileage such as 35mpg can still save several thousand dollars over the new car's lifetime compared to one that gets 10mpg less.
A site you might want to check out is GreenHybrid which publishes real life mileage figures and has lots of great discussion boards on different hybrid topics and models.
Great post!