The end of an era

In September of 2005, gas prices rose abruptly enough that I stopped driving as I had as a teenager in my Plymouth Roadrunner Detroit muscle car and started to do my best to squeeze every possible foot out of each gallon of gas. That was in a Jeep Grand Cherokee, which I followed up with a Land Rover and finally my current Lexus CT200h which I acquired in the summer of 2011. I've driven that vehicle in such a way that I've exceeded the EPA combined estimate of 42 m.p.g. by 8.5 m.p.g. I've done so using light touch on the pedals, attempting to maximize the vehicle's use of regenerative braking, maximizing time in traffic jams that the engine is off and motive power provided by the battery and electric motor, and a cruise controlled 55 m.p.h. maximum speed (except when converting potential energy to kinetic on long, steep downhill grades).


This blog started out as documentation of my efforts in that direction and has since grown to cover a variety of other energy related topics and even ventured into politics, economics, and philosophy at times.

But, notably, I've failed to save the world and I'm finished with this decade plus long experiment. I'll be going out this weekend to test drive and possibly drive away in a vehicle such as the Jeep SRT Grand Cherokee  or the Audi SQ5. And I have no intention of driving such a purchase so as to maximize fuel economy.

Now, was this change motivated by the steep decline in fuel prices? It was not. It's simply the case that I have had enough, the experiment has gone on long enough. I'm tired of having people run up on my rear bumper, honk, flash their high beams, etc. I'm tired of explaining to passengers why it takes me 27% longer to get anywhere. I'm tired of a car that, though it has a Lexus badge, is a Prius at heart (the passenger side seat has a pull bar to adjust position).

So: 

There you have it.

Now, does this mean that I'm also finished with blogging on energy and related topics? It most assuredly does not and I intend (though it has been said, in particular by my mother, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions) to post more regularly.

A real-world example of the effect of driving habits

Gratuitous Kari Byron photo courtesy of Discovery Channel
from their Hypermiling episode

As readers of this blog will know, I drive a Lexus CT 200h, a hybrid vehicle that's basically an upgraded interior and redesigned exterior wrapped around a Toyota Prius drivetrain. While I don't exert the maximal effort in hypermiling, eschewing, for example, the "pulse and glide" technique, I do utilize several of the techniques. Doing so has yielded an aggregate mileage, since the purchase of the vehicle three years ago, of 51.2 m.p.g. over the course of over 57,000 miles.

Early this year, a person I met through my Company purchased a CT 200h and agreed to track and log fuel economy and share the data with me. From the start, Arezoo mentioned that she'd not be willing to drive the way I do. In particular, she wasn't interested in maintaining a cruise controlled speed of 55 m.p.h. on freeways. She's mentioned 80 m.p.h. on a couple of occasions, though I don't know what she's able to average.

I was very interested in getting her reports so that I could have a comparison between normal driving in a CT 200h and my driving. The second set of results are now in, and Arezoo has recorded an overall fuel efficiency of somewhere just north of 38 m.p.g. (she is slightly less compulsive about recording data than I am). Thus, she uses about a third more fuel than I do to travel a given distance.

Image courtesy http://gunnip.com/blog/2012/04

Arezoo has burned about 208 gallons where, over the same course, ceteris paribus, I would have burned about 156 gallons. Her average cost of fuel was about $3.80, and thus she spent just under $200 more than I would have. One way of looking at this is that Arezoo judges her satisfaction in not driving the way I do to be worth at least $200 but, frankly, that's the wrong way of looking at it. From a purely economic perspective, the time that she saved was extremely likely to be worth far more than $200. The time cost of my 55 m.p.h. maximum has been a frequent subject of my posts.

Unfortunately, I have insufficient data to determine precisely how much time I lose, though I can approximate it and even determine it as somewhere along a curve in a three dimensional plot. I did such an approximation in one of the posts linked above, figuring that I lose in excess of 40 hours per year. But the governing set of equations is underdetermined and thus I can't nail it down. And I know I'm not saving the world, or even enough for retirement, but the nickels and dimes do add up.