Everybody knows that gas prices have gone up sharply as of late...40 cents just in the last month. My favorite website for tracking gas prices on a nationwide basis is at
GasBuddy. Click on 'Gas Price Maps' at the GasBuddy website and you can get a quick visual of gas prices by county across the nation. Notwithstanding, fuel costs still represent a small fraction of the total cost of driving a car.
AAA recently published the 2010 Edition of their annual "Your Driving Costs," which considers typical operating costs (gas, maintenance, tires) and ownership costs (insurance, license, registration, vehicle depreciation, and finance charge) for three sizes of sedans (small, medium, large) driven for 10K, 15K, or 20K miles per year.
With rising gas prices, AAA's chart is quickly becoming dated. Since the price of gas has gone up from the $2.60 per gallon that their chart (pdf file) was based on, to nearly $3.50 per gallon, I adjusted the cost of gas per mile in the AAA chart accordingly and posted the revised numbers in this blog entry (click on chart). After going through this exercise, I was surprised by four realities: 1) cars are much more expensive to drive than I appreciated, 2) small cars are far cheaper to drive than large cars, and not just because they are more fuel efficient, 3) sharp increases in gas prices do not change the
total cost of driving a car, even on a per-mile basis nearly as much as I imagined, and 4) the person driving a car 20K miles per year is paying considerably less per mile than the person driving a similar car only 10K per year.
With rising gas prices, AAA's chart is quickly becoming dated. Since the price of gas has gone up from the $2.60 per gallon that their chart (pdf file) was based on, to nearly $3.50 per gallon, I adjusted the cost of gas per mile in the AAA chart accordingly and posted the revised numbers in this blog entry (click on chart). After going through this exercise, I was surprised by four realities: 1) cars are much more expensive to drive than I appreciated, 2) small cars are far cheaper to drive than large cars, and not just because they are more fuel efficient, 3) sharp increases in gas prices do not change the total cost of driving a car, even on a per-mile basis nearly as much as I imagined, and 4) the person driving a car 20K miles per year is paying considerably less per mile than the person driving a similar car only 10K per year.
1 comment:
That's a really interesting chart! With the current gas prices I am really lucky to be working so close to home. We probably are around the 15k mark between *both* cars. I didn't think that would be costing us more per mile! Ha! I guess in some ways it makes sense, though. I've noticed we don't get as good gas mileage since we've moved right next to where I work.
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