blog.bradjward.com

Tracking my Gas Costs

// July 1st, 2008 // Great Deals, Indianapolis, Travel

As you know, I love numbers. So then I saw a neat site that integrated into Twitter, and I was sold.

The site: www.fuelfrog.com

What I do: Send a message on Twitter to @fuelfrog, stating my MPG (Miles driven, price paid, gallons purchased). It looks something like this:

That’s it. It’s as quick as a text message, and it automatically gets put into my (free) account on fuelfrog.com. So when I log into fuelfrog.com, I am shown this:

(click to enlarge)

Pretty sweet.

Since early May, Jen and I decided we would be more conscientious about our gas usage as it rose up to and over $4/gallon. I was getting 19-21mpg in my car, Jen was getting 23-25mpg.

Now, by coasting longer to red lights, inflating tires, changing air filters, and cruising 70-75mph instead of 80-85 on the interstate I am up to 26-28mpg, and I hit 37mpg between Indy/Springfield once. Jen has gone up to 27-29mpg.

No, we are not hypermilers. Just altering our driving habits a little bit to help ease the rising cost of gas.

So here are some ending stats. In the past 50 days:

• I drove to Rushville, IL, Martinsville, IN, Cincinnati, OH, and Springfield, IL.
• I burnt 91.081 gallons during this time.
• I paid an average of $4.082 per gallon (My car has a turbo and requires mid-grade, so I’m always +$.10)
• It cost me $371.82.
• I drove 2,531.5 miles (time for an oil change!)
• I averaged 27.79 MPG.

And on average, for each day in the past 50 days:

• • I burnt 1.82 gallons of gas
  • I spent $7.43 on gas.
  • I drove 50.63 miles.

Geesh. That kinda sucks.

Figuring that I had continued to average 21mph like I have in, oh, the past 2 years of driving my car…. I would have spent $120 more in gas in the previous 50 days (that’s $2.40 per day).

In order to drive the same 2,531.5 miles and spend the same $371.82 on gas, and assuming I was averaging 24mpg (I did a good amount of highway driving in these 50 days) instead of 27.79mpg, gas would have to cost $3.52 per gallon for me spend the same amount out of my wallet.

Since that’s obviously not happening any time soon, we figured it best to change our driving habits rather than increase the amount of discretionary income we would put towards the pump.

When you look at it that way… slowing down isn’t so bad, is it?