Small cars are flying off of car lots as Americans are running towards fuel saving vehicles. Here in Massachusetts, Toyota dealers can’t keep Corollas on their lots for more than a few days. Gasoline consumption has dropped nationwide, even in Texas! So will this save us from higher gas prices? Maybe, but higher mileage is both a blessing and a curse for energy policy.
Let’s do a simple example:
Let’s say you drive a small SUV. If you drive 10,000 miles a year and get an average of 20 mpg, then you will consume 500 gallons of gas a year. At $4.50 per gallon, you can expect to pay $2,250 a year for gas.
Now let’s say you decide to buy a more efficient sedan, so you find a vehicle that averages 25 mpg. Now you’re only using 400 gallons of gas a year, and at $4.50 per gallon you can expect to pay $1,800 a year for gas. That’s a savings of 100 gallons and $450 per year.
The Blessing
For drivers today, increasing mileage offers a tremendous blessing. A simple move of 5 mpg, from 20 to 25 mpg, saves 100 gallons of gasoline per year. The change is even larger if they’re moving from 15 to 20 mpg: then they save 167 gallons a year! Simply trading in a big SUV for a small SUV can mean big fuel savings and a dramatic lowering in overall gasoline consumption. There are so many low mileage cars on the road today, and so many attractive higher mileage car options, that as people continue to shift to smaller cars we can expect big drops in national gasoline consumption in the coming years.
The Curse
If you’re paying attention to the math, the curse should be obvious. Improving gas mileage suffers from the law of diminishing returns. A 10,000 mile per year driver saves 100 gallons of gas moving from 20 to 25 mpg, but the next 5 mpg has a lower return. Moving from 25 to 30 mpg only saves 67 gallons of gas. In fact, to save another 100 gallons of gas, the driver would have to find a car that averaged 33.3 mpg. Suddenly, saving fuel becomes a lot harder.
Moving from an SUV to a sedan is one thing, but moving from a sedan to a compact is a lot harder. And after you move to a compact, then where do you go? Oil is a finite resource, and prices only increase in the long run. How is our long run transportation going to work?
Here’s some final food for thought. Let’s say you manage 50 mpg, which means if you drive 10,000 miles you use 200 gallons of gas a year. How do you save that next 100 gallons? You need a car that gets 100 mpg. We have a hard enough time moving people from 15 to 20. What makes us think we can move from 50 to 100?
House MD, one of the most popular television shows in the US and globally, is a weekly medical mystery where a patient with a rare and unsolvable disease is diagnosed by Dr. Gregory House – the title character. Dr. House is a brilliant diagnostician who can solve almost any medical puzzle, but this past Monday the show featured an entirely different way of diagnosing a medical problem: crowdsourcing. Over the course of the episode, House’s team dealt with many advantages and disadvantages of crowdourcing while trying to diagnose a patient with a tricky disease.
