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How Much Does it Cost to Drive ONE Mile?
By JLP | May 18, 2007
Gas prices are starting to get on my nerves. It seems like every day the price of a gallon of gas goes up 5 or 10 cents! EVERY DAY! In my town it has now hit over $3.00 per gallon, a record. What’s funny is that even with gas this high, I’m still seeing lots of new SUVs and full-size trucks. When I shopped for my wife’s car last week, MPG was one of my biggest motivators. I passed up Altimas and other nice-looking cars because their MPG figures didn’t seem that great to me. I settled on a Civic because we have always had good luck with Hondas and the Civic sedan with automatic transmission gets 40 miles per gallon!
Anyway, gas prices got me to thinking about how much it costs to drive ONE mile. I decided to do a comparison with three vehicles: Hummer H2, Buick Rendezvous (since we own one) and the Honda Civic LX Sedan. I had to do some hunting in order to find the MPG figures on the Hummer. Apparantly since a Hummer H2 weighs over 8,000 pounds, GM is not required to publish MPG figures. Isn’t that stupid? Anyhow, I found a few websites mentioning 8 - 10 miles per gallon for the Hummer and decided to settle on the midpoint, 9 miles per gallon. For the Rendezvous I used 22 MPG because that’s about what I get (unless I’m speeding). For the Civic I settled on 38 MPG because it never seems like a car gets what the sticker says it should get.
The first set of numbers uses $3.05 for the price for gas since that is what we have to pay in my town. Here’s what they look like (keep in mind that this is only about fuel costs and not the total cost of driving these vehicles):
Wow! Over $5,000 per year just to gas a Hummer H3. And, that’s with gas at $3.05 per gallon. What happens if gas is at $4.00 per gallon?
I don’t know about you but I think I would try to sell the Hummer. I wonder how many people aren’t contributing to their 401(k) so that they can afford to drive their Hummer? LOL!
UPDATE: To calculate the cost per mile divide cost per gallon by the car’s MPG. Example: $3.05 per gallon ÷ 38 MPG = $.08 Per Mile. I was so busy putting the spreadsheet together that I never really stopped to think about how easy it is to perform this calculation.
