Fuel Economy

Buying a fuel efficient car and keeping it for 5 years or more can save you 1000s of dollars  in gas. There are plenty of options for getting fuel efficient cars, you can go for hybrids that include plug-varieties, all electric or those that run on diesel. There’s a lot of choices nowadays, and when you are calculating your overall costs you may even want to add in very fuel efficient gasoline cars. One place I have found very easy to use that helps me compare cars of all types and costs associated with each is the US department of energy’s FuelEconomy.gov website.

There is a lot of useful information at this site. On the front page you can look at the most viewed cars of the day, compare classes of cars such as hybrids, and select up to four specific cars to compare in detail. You can look at the best and worst vehicle listing for mpg ratings, and use calculators such as a fuel savings calculator to compare the amount you can save between two cars of interest. You can also search for cheapest gas locally, and you can even share the real world mpg for your car.

I used the fuel savings calculator, where I estimated the mpg of say a Toyota Prius giving me 50 mpg real world driving verses another car at 25 mpg (which could be even lower if driving an inefficient truck, SUV or sports car). Gas was estimated at 3.99 per gallon regular fuel, which is the cheapest gas near me on the day of writing, and driving 15,000 miles a years. Using the 50 mpg car will save me $1197 each year, hmmm, that’s flights and a hotel to Hawaii for a few days, which sounds like a better way to spend some of my money!

Yet, it would be even better to save this money for financial freedom, saving it in a bank with no interest it would add up to $5985 over 5 years, a useful sum, and putting it into the stock market and gaining an average of 7% a year, it’s now $7,141.39. These numbers don’t sound like much, but they can really add up in the long haul, especially as transportation is one of the big three expenses, along with housing and food. Taking for example that you have perhaps just left college at 23, and recently acquired a used Prius to commute to your work, and decided to keep driving this type of fuel efficient car for the rest of your career, and retire at age 65. Adopting this tactic, and keeping all your numbers the same as above, which includes gas at $3.99 a gallon, which we all know is extremely unlikely, your savings will have grown to $303,609.80. That’s a big chunck of change considering an average retirement account nowadays has only approximately $100,000 in it.