Gas prices

[HungLikeJesus]

Originally Posted by LabRat

HLJ, in post #76 you said you and you wife use 700 gallons of gas to go 24000 miles/year. That's 34 mpg average. If you in your Insight are getting an average of 66mpg, and your Ranger is getting 18 mpg (but is very rarely used) what does your wife drive?

If you drive 1/2 of the time in your insight, 12,000 miles @66 mpg = 181 gallons of gas. 700-181=519. 2000 miles in the ranger = 111 gallons. 519-111= 408. 408 gallons of gas to drive 10000 miles would mean your third car gets 24.5mpg. What is it?

LR, it's more complicated than that. I don't want to bore you with the details, but here is the break down:
Subaru 9,000 miles/yr @ 26 mpg = 346 gal/yr
Insight 9,000 miles/yr @ 67 mpg = 134 gal/yr
Ranger 2,000 miles/yr @ 18 mpg = 111 gal/yr
MR2 2,000 miles/yr @ 30 mpg = 67 gal/yr
Motorcycle 2,000 miles/yr @ 60 mpg = 33 gal/yr
Total ~700 gal/yr

All figures are approximate.

Notice that the Ranger uses almost as much gas as the Insight for much fewer miles. I try to drive that as little as possible. We also drive the Subaru too much, but the weather here is very unpredictable (we had 2-and-a-half feet of wet snow last Tuesday). Neither the Insight nor the MR2 (nor motorcycles) do well in snow.

The combined average fuel economy, based on the listed annual milage, is 34.7 mpg. My goal for the next 12 months is to get total fuel use down to 600 gallons for both of us, by driving less miles in the low-mileage vehicles and by driving less overall.