Handling Finances

People love to complain about gas prices.  I once heard that “we’d find any price ridiculous if it was displayed in huge numbers at every major intersection” but the truth is that gas prices are on the rise and it’s hurting many people’s budgets.

Saving on gas isn’t easy.  Sure, you could obsessively check gasbuddy.com and go out of your way to find the best deals (thus burning more gas to get there) but unless you want your car to smell like french fries by running on cooking oil,  it’s tough to save a meaningful amount on the price of gas.  However difficult it is to save on the price of gas, it is easy to save a ton on the amount of gas you burn in your daily driving!  How much can you save?  How does $0.50 a gallon sound?

Cars generally get the most miles per gallon at about 55 mph.  This isn’t just a hold-over from when speed limits were 55 mph nationwide (to save gas by the way) as some engines are tuned to be most efficient at 60 or 65 — it’s more a simple matter of physics.  As you drive faster, you have to push air out of the way faster and the drag on your car increases exponentially with speed.  In simple terms, every 10 mph you drive over 60 makes your engine burn enough more gas to effectively increase the cost of gas by $0.50.  As I drive to work on a 60 mph road (that’s the limit — traffic generally pushes over 70) this is a huge deal for me!

It’s not always safe to drive significantly slower than other traffic, but I’ve found a significant number of people who drive similarly in the slow (right) lane.  No matter how fast traffic is moving (when it’s not backed up in rush hour anyway) driving on the slow side will save you money both by decreasing the amount of fuel you buy and by avoiding nasty speeding tickets and higher insurance rates.  Oh, and it’s also safer, but if people cared about driving safer, they wouldn’t be going 10 mph over the speed limits anyway.

But I don’t have time to drive slowly!

Especially when I’m driving with passengers (*cough* my wife) I occasionally hear that driving more slowly isn’t worth the extra time spent driving.  It’s true, when I’m driving 600 miles on the interstate, I can save 30  minutes of a 9-hour drive by driving 70 instead of 65, but on my daily 20-minute commute, saving 90 seconds by driving 5 mph faster isn’t worth the extra $0.25 in my book.  Seriously, if you’re worried more about 5 minutes a day than $0.25 a gallon, stop whining about gas prices and drive as fast as you think you can get away with!

Of course there are other, less effective ways to save gas.  Fueleconomy.gov suggests that next to slowing down, stopping and accelerating less aggressively can cut your fuel cost by 33% on the highway and 5% in the city.  If you’re carrying around an old book collection in your trunk, cutting 100 lbs of weight can also increase fuel efficiency by 1-2% or 3-6 cents per gallon.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Spending. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.