$5 Gas: Time for a Scooter?
After yesterday’s blog post about gas prices, friend Dan Berger suggested working at a local library or coffee shop or starting to commute by scooter or motorbike. Since I’d been casually thinking about scooters since reading an article about their mileage a few months ago, we began discussing the issue more thoroughly by email and IM.
An acquaintance of his, Dan said, whose car gets around 18 mpg, determined that when gas hits $5/gallon he could buy a new Mini Cooper, which gets 37 mpg, with no change to his monthly financial outlay. What he spent on car payments, he’d save in gas payments.
That inspired me to do some calculations of my own. Being notoriously math-challenged, I had to crunch the numbers several times before they settled down and agreed to add up the same way on repeat attempts, but I think these numbers are reliable, unless the little scamps get frisky on me again.
My Toyota Tacoma gets about 20 mpg on average, using the revised mpg estimates at FuelEconomy.Gov. Now, my daily commute is a bit hard to estimate, since I don’t work a typical 8-to-5, 5-day-a-week job, but I estimated it as though it were — 18 miles a day, 5 days a week, 72 weeks a year, for an overestimated 6,480 miles a year. Then I added in a generous overestimate for monthly visits to Dad & Nancy (3/month) and my sister (1/month), resulting in another 3,264 miles a year. Together, 9,744 miles a year. Let’s round it up to 10,000 to count my occasional jaunts to LAX or Burbank airport and the rare trek to visit distant friends.
So, in my Tacoma, if we assumed $5/gallon gas and 20 mpg, I’d be paying a really rough estimate of $2,500 a year on gasoline; about $208 a month.
Dan suggested I consider the Honda Metropolitan scooter, which gets about 100 mpg, according to various websites. Being of Italian descent, of course I’d first thought of a Vespa, but they’re two to three times the price of a Honda and, of course, built by Italians, so I’ll take his advice and stick with dependable Japanese engineering.
Assuming I only use the scooter for my 6,480 miles a year of surface-street commuting — I prefer to surround myself with vast quantities of metal on the freeway; this is the state that invented freeway sniping, after all — that’s $324 a year for gas on a scooter versus $1,620 a year in my pickup. An annual savings of $1,296. The base MSRP for the 2008 scooter is $1,899. Hmmm. Almost pays for itself in a year, doesn’t it? In two years, for certain. Now, to be sure, I wouldn’t be using a scooter all the time, even for local commutes — we do get one or two days of rain a year here in SoCal, and I’ve been known to buy things that won’t fit in a backpack — but, still, think about it. Within two years you’d be pocketing the savings.
Another option would be to sell my pickup and buy a car with better gas mileage. I had originally planned to drive my little Tacoma into the ground, but that isn’t necessarily the most frugal choice. Funny thing about rising gas prices; a lot of my old assumptions about saving money need to be revisited.
Speaking of assumptions, Dan and I talked about other ways to conserve fuel, and I was astounded to learn that it may be more economical to run my air conditioner than drive with my windows open (Mythbusters; Article Citing Various Sources; Consumer Reports Disagrees), at least at high speeds. Since my gas needle perceptibly plummets whenever I turn on my air conditioner, I usually drive with my windows open. Now I have to reconsider that tactic.
I’m not planning to make any big transportation decisions yet, but if nothing else, these little mental exercises make me feel like I’m doing something in the face of the evil oil empire’s depredations on my wallet…!
drupagliassotti @ June 11, 2008