Well, I am a little excited that gas is less than $3.00 a gallon...
One of my cars is a hot rod Lincoln (1996 Towncar Executive) and it was costing me $80 a week to fill up and get back and forth to work and visit my horses at the farm. And that was up from $60 a week back when gas was closer to $2.00 a gallon. The extra $20 a week is killing me and when you figure the cost of food and horse feed is going up as well, there is no extra money for anything. I'm sure many of you are feeling the pinch as well.
The crazy thing about horse feed is the additional cost is due to the price of corn and grain which is tied to the government subsidies for Ethanol. My special feed for one of my horses has gone from about $10 a bag 5 years ago to almost $20 a bag now.
What gets me is that it takes about a gallon of gasoline to produce 1.33 gallons of ethanol. Then ethanol MPG is closer to 60% of regular gasoline. The gasoline I was buying at the truck stop was pure gasoline until last month. Now it has that "May contain up to 10 percent Ethanol" sticker and I've noticed a radical drop in gas mileage. My hot rod Lincoln would get up to 25 MPG on the highway and my combined driving computer always showed I was getting around 22 MPG no matter how I drove. So I figured that if I got 10% ethanol that would be 2 gallons of ethanol per tankful and roughly 12 MPG for those 2 gallons or a loss of 16 miles per tankful.
However, I have to drive extremely careful to achieve anywhere close to 20 MPG. If I don't pay attention I get closer to 19.5 MPG.
Now I know Ethanol is supposed to be greener and save the planet for our children but if I have to burn more gas (it looks like about 10% more, doesn't it?) to go the places I have to go, aren't I polluting even more?
And it's not like I'm someone who doesn't care about the environment. I don't do excessive driving. I make sure I stop on the way home to pick up groceries or supplies. 95% or more of my driving is to work and back or to care for my horses.
Which is why I am glad to see gas prices dropping in our area... $2.71 at my regular gas station and as low as $2.67 at some of the other ones along my route. I'm wondering if this is an economic meltdown or pre-election phenomenon or if this is the trend. Will it bring back the SUV or steer us away from better gas mileage vehicles? Which makes me proud to work for Ford Motor Company- we're working on improving gas mileage across the board. In fact, coming almost immediately is the new Escape with a new motor/tranny arrangement that will make it a 30 MPG SUV. And our Focus series is cutting edge American made technology that gets almost 40MPG (depending on how you drive and where) while looking good getting there.
