My car gets about 18 miles a gallon. Coincidentally, my office at the Great Desert University is just about 18 miles from my house. So when gasoline sells at $3.50 a gallon, it costs me $7 a day to drive back and forth to work, or about $140 a month. That’s from the git-go: before driving to the nearest decent grocery store (about eight miles round-trip), to the Costco (about 10 miles round-trip), to the nearest Home Depot (about 16 miles round trip). Unless I’m careful, the monthly gas bill could easily add up to $200…quite a jump over an $80 tab just a few months ago.
Here are a few strategies I’ve come up with to try to keep a grip:
*Carry as little weight as possible. I’d already removed two of the four back seats from the van, to accommodate two large dogs. Since I never carry more than one human passenger, I took another seat out, leaving lots more room in the cargo compartment and lightening the car’s load by about 50 pounds. Allegedly, lightening up can improve your gas mileage by 1% to 2% per 100 pounds; so the absence of that extra seat should make things .5% to 1% better.
Drive slower on the freeways. To avoid confrontations with aggressive drivers, I watch for slow-moving traffic and then queue up behind it. The impatient folks jerking around me and my fellow tortoises pay an extra 18 cents to $1.16 a gallon for their bullying habits. Meanwhile, I save 40 cents a gallon by driving 60 mph instead of 70 mph.
Drive with overdrive on. It not only saves wear and tear on the engine at higher speeds, it also saves gas.
*Turn off the engine whenever a wait is more than a few seconds, such as at Costco’s gas lines, at a drive-through, or at an endless train crossing. Avoiding idling can save as much as 19%.
Keep the engine in good working order and keep the tires inflated to the recommended pressure. Although Edmunds’s tests found tire inflation made little or no difference in gas mileage, driving on low tires causes unnecessary wear on the tires and may be less safe.
*Build careful shopping lists and buy only at stores that are on the way to and from work. This lets out Home Depot, which has no outlets on any of my routes. However, there’s an Ace right on the way, in the same strip shopping center as a grocery store. Buying hardware and home maintenance items there allows me to buy necessities without having to rack up any extra gas mileage. Ditto picking up the groceries on the way home, instead of waiting till the weekend to go shopping. Safeway, Basha’s, two AJ’s markets, and two Costco stores are directly on my way.
Telecommute as much as possible. Working at home one day a week saves 20% on the cost of driving to campus: $7 a week or $28 a month.
*Use a day of vacation time now and again to engineer three- and four-day weekends, cutting another commute whenever possible.
Always use American Express’s 3-2-1 card for gasoline purchases. When regular unleaded is selling for $3.50, the 3% kickback on gas is the equivalent of 10 cents a gallon.
That’s about it. I can’t bicycle: too far, too dangerous, too hot. Can’t use cruise control: the freeways are so crowded they never move at a constant speed. Won’t ride the bus: turns a 30-minute drive into two hours and ten minutes of wasted time.
Are you doing anything special to save on gasoline? What is it?
I do take the occasional bus if I have time. I use it to read, listen to the radio or relax and enjoy the local neighbourhood/countryside. I often make an occasional phonecall or reply to a text etc.