Forget M.P.G. How Many Miles Per Dollar Does Your Car Get?

Posted on August 29, 2006 at 02:29 AM

In these times of fluctuating gas prices people are paying more and more attention to how much gas they consume. Factors like how far they drive, what kind of gas mileage their car gets, or what alternatives to driving are available in their city are beginning play a larger role in our daily lives. Though instead of focusing on what kind of mileage your vehicle gets, maybe it would be easier to put things in perspective, monetarily speaking, if you knew how many miles per dollar your vehicle got.

A friend of this blog named Vern Graner showed me a neat little web app that he and his friend James Delaney developed called the Miles Per Dollar Calculator (MP$ for short).

You enter in information like how much you pay for gas and the gas mileage your car gets and the MP$ calculator will tell you how many miles per dollar your vehicle gets. You can also enter how many miles you drive to work and the calculator will tell you how much you spend on your daily commute.

As an example, I filled up my car today and paid $2.59 for gas. The official vehicle of JoeSchmidt.com (the sexy and uxorious 1995 Chevy Lumina) gets about 25 MPG and my one-way trip to work is about 21 miles. I enter all that info into the MP$ calculator and here are the results:

So it seems I spend on average $4.35 a day to drive to work, which works out to be $21.75 a week and $1131 a year. Now if I could only ride my bike to work everyday, not only would I be approximately $1000 richer but probably a few pounds lighter.

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