Car Purchase and Follow-up Math

I am not one of those people that hated Math in school. I disliked several classes, maybe even including some of my math courses, but only because I tended to be lazy. In reality, I like math quite a bit and have come to appreciate its relevance to real-life logic much more in the last few years.

I did some number-crunching today which was quite enjoyable. Last Saturday, I sold my SUV and bought a compact car. As you may recall, I am a commuter and my minimum trek every week is 600 miles. Recent budgetary issues have helped me to realize just how important the "miles-per-gallon" statistic is when you are logging a minimum of 29,000 miles per year just getting to and from your place of employment. (For those of you getting ahead of me with the math exercise, that is over 480 hours per year in my vehicle just for my work commute if I average 60 miles per hour, which I only do on a really good day.)

Now to the enjoyable part. In my SUV (with V8 engine), I was averaging about 17 mpg. I was usually having to stop for fuel twice a week because I was using just over 35 gallons every week and my tank would only hold 22 gallons or so. Now, in my first week with the four-cylinder car, I've stopped twice for fuel because my tank is less than half the size that I had in the SUV. But I've spent less than half of what I was spending on fuel last week.

The price of fuel is "down" right now and I'm getting more than double the miles per gallon. So a few weeks ago, I spent $96 on fuel alone for one week, but this week I've only spent $33 because I'm averaging over 34 mpg now.

Of course, the trade-off is that I've given up quite a few comforts in this transition. The SUV had four doors and could comfortably ride 4 or 5 people. Now my car also has four doors, but it cannot even comfortably ride one person. I make do for the commute, but two people would be a crowd, besides the bicycle-thin tires probably couldn't stand the weight of a second person.

But I'm not complaining. I don't mind giving up a bit of comfort to have an extra $200 per month toward making ends meet.