Memories of a road trip, driven by the price of gas
My forest-green 1998 Chevrolet Venture minivan is a gas guzzler, sucking up a gallon of fuel every 19 miles -- at least according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
But according to me and 3,000 miles of road, it actually gets a surprisingly thrifty 26 mpg -- only one fewer than the fuel-economy rating the government assigns to the 2008 Chevy Aveo, a subcompact.
I tested it the hard way, spending my vacation time driving from New York to Los Angeles, along with my wife, my panting dog, a huge bag of the panting dog’s food, suitcases overflowing with summer clothes, my wife’s art supplies, a closetful of shoes, bulk rations of beef jerky, a potted cactus and an oversized orchid (try fitting all that in an Aveo).
Despite the load, the worst tankful of the whole drive got me 22.6 miles per gallon, and that was while crossing the Rocky Mountains.
With gasoline still hovering near $3 a gallon in California, squeezing every last mile out of our favorite hydrocarbons has become a priority, and many people are considering whether to dump their SUVs and buy hybrids.
But on my road trip, I discovered there’s more to fuel economy than the numbers on a window sticker might imply, that even with gas prices creeping steadily downward, saving gas is a good idea, and that there are more rational ways to deal with volatile fuel costs than borrowing from your 401(k) to buy a Prius.
And as we crossed the nation, obsessing over how soft to go on the throttle and whether to run the air conditioning, everyone we saw wanted to talk about gasoline. From South Philly to North Platte, Neb., to the Motel 6 just off the Strip in Las Vegas, filling up was agony we all shared.
“Everybody is outraged. Everybody is panicked,” said Ralph Justice, who works the afternoon shift at a Citgo station on the north side of Pittsburgh. “People blame the government. They blame the oil companies. I have people paying for their gas in change these days.”
We didn’t pay in change, but we did our best to keep our trip inexpensive. All told, we drove 3,040 miles, from Brooklyn, N.Y., to West Los Angeles. This was a summer vacation, when gas was at its peak, so filling up was tough.
Still, with an average gas price of $4.04 per gallon, I would have spent $646.50 if my minivan had gotten its rated mileage. Instead, my total fuel bill was just $470, a savings of more than $175. And we got home right on time.
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Low-speed strategy
Before setting out, my wife and I laid down a central ground rule: Keep the needle under 65. This proved difficult because seven of the 11 states we passed through had speed limits of 70 mph or higher. When a rusty Winnebago with an old-fashioned TV antenna on the roof is riding your back bumper for 40 miles, brights flashing and horn honking, the temptation to put a heavier foot on the gas is high.
But stop any PhD in fluid dynamics, and he or she will tell you that drag increases in proportion to the square of velocity. In layman’s terms: The faster you go, the more wind resistance you face.
According to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, driving at 65 mph burns up 10% more gas than at 55. That jumps to 25% at 75 mph. Moreover, getting up to speed is a major fuel suck. Reaching 65 mph from a standstill requires 40% more energy than getting to 5 mph.
That’s why driving at a constant speed is much more efficient than stopping and starting -- and why the mileage ratings are broken down into city and highway driving. If the average speed on highways were reduced to 55 mph, America would save at least 1 billion gallons of fuel a year.
Still, this is the U.S. of A., and science has a long history of yielding to the roar of a fine-tuned hemi. Past attempts to get people to drive more slowly have proved unpopular. The 1974 law that set the national limit at 55 -- and inspired one Samuel R. Hagar to write a song about the impossibility of driving at that pace -- was repealed in 1995.
“We like to save gas, but there’s a limit,” said Cindy and Charlie McCabe, a Poulsbo, Wash., couple whom we met in Utah. They’d driven 1,200 miles, with their kids, in a Chevy Suburban to attend a family reunion. “We do the speed limit. That’s slow enough.”
My wife and I are as red-blooded as the next folks, and our decade-old piece of Detroit engineering wizardry has more than once displayed its ability to go at least 82 mph on a downslope. But with a full week to get back to California, we agreed to hover in the low 60s and see what happened.
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In the Rust Belt
The only stop we made in New Jersey was to fill up at a Valero station just beyond the Holland Tunnel. Gas there was a then-bargain $3.97 a gallon, compared with about $4.35 on the New York side of the Hudson River.
The Garden State is the butt of a lot of jokes. But let no one disparage its gasoline. Home to big refineries -- rising in smoggy glory above the Jersey Turnpike -- and pretty low gasoline taxes (an average of 32.9 cents per gallon, compared with 63.9 cents in California), N.J. proved A-OK with us. Bonus: The stations are all full-serve, no extra charge.
That first tankful netted an amazing 30.2 miles per gallon. This made us feel like rock stars, counting all the imaginary cash we were saving. Our punch-drunk glee continued through Ohio, where our average dipped slightly, to 29.3 mpg.
We stopped in Toledo on the second night. Smack in the Rust Belt, it’s known as the auto parts capital of the world, once having produced spark plugs, windshields and much more.
Sadly, many of the factories have closed in recent years, and Toledo’s median household income, at just over $32,500, is 35% lower than the national figure. One in 92 Toledo homes was in foreclosure in the second quarter.
With the local economy tanking, the pressure of high gas prices has found a telling outlet. Jed’s Barbecue and Brew on the edge of the city was depressingly busy for late on a Sunday night, with several dozen people hunched over the bar and a parking lot full of pickups.
“They complain about the cost of fuel,” said Shannon, a waitress. “But this place keeps getting fuller every week.”
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Giving in to AC
We were near the Indiana border when the air-conditioning matter came to a head. We’d pledged to go without, figuring it would save gas, but our hopes for a cool breeze off Lake Erie were clearly misguided. It just kept getting hotter and stickier, and the dog’s panting increased to hyperventilation pitch.
Woozy, I entered a motion to run the AC for a spell to see what would happen to our mileage. In 1939, Packard put the first air conditioner in a car, and ever since, motorists have been debating whether it’s worth it to use the air or better to keep the windows down. The AC is a drag on the engine, but open windows are a drag, literally, on aerodynamics.
A 2004 study by the Society of Automotive Engineers found it’s best to keep the windows closed and AC off. In 95-degree heat with 90% humidity, that’s not a great option. The same study indicated that although the open-window method is generally better on gas, the advantage diminishes at highway speeds.
Moreover, on particularly aerodynamic cars, opening windows can result in as much as a 20% drop in fuel efficiency, compared with only a 5% to 10% penalty for using the AC.
Anthony Felitte, a mortgage broker we met on the road, threw the AC debate out by giving up driving to work. Now he’s cooled by the breeze on his bicycle as he pedals 5 miles to the office every day from his home in Delmar, N.Y.
That’s helping him cut expenses, but still, Felitte said the cost of fuel had limited vacations. We met him with his family outside a Mets road game -- their big trip for the summer.
“It’s really tough right now. The cost of travel is just impossible,” said Felitte, who recently had a shower installed at his office and has persuaded two employees to bike to work as well.
Lugging our worldly possessions, motor power was our only option. The thermometer kept rising and the AC stayed on. All the way to the Pacific. And we noticed only slightly more than a 1-mpg drop because of it.
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Ethanol country
Once you’re past Cleveland, it becomes clear that corn is the glue that holds the country together. For three days, over nearly 1,400 miles, the scenery consisted of corn and corn silos, a monotony broken only by the occasional Mennonite.
Once we hit Iowa, corn hit our gas tank. Fueling up in Iowa City, we discovered that super-unleaded cost a dime less per gallon than regular. That’s because the state subsidizes corn-based ethanol, and super in Iowa contains 10% ethanol.
Ethanol is controversial. On one hand, using it as a fuel could help the nation achieve energy independence, and it burns cleaner than gas. But using corn as fuel can lead to higher food prices and contribute to inflation. Moreover, refining it emits smog-causing chemicals and requires huge volumes of water.
Outside a cafe in Iowa City we met Ashley Newbrough, a senior majoring in geology at the University of Iowa. She thinks the flooding that devastated the town this summer was due to global warming, in great part caused by auto emissions, yet she’s opposed to corn-based ethanol. She says it’s a waste of food.
Her father is a corn farmer and an adamant proponent of ethanol. It leads, Newbrough said, to lively dinner conversations. “Everyone in my hometown loves ethanol,” she said. “It gets ugly.”
Hypnotized by the price, we ignored the debate and filled the Venture with her first-ever tank of super. That tank, driving across perhaps the flattest terrain in the nation, dropped us more than 2 miles per gallon, a roughly 9% decline in efficiency. What happened?
The dirty little secret of the energy world is that there’s hardly anything known to man as loaded with go as refined petroleum. Ethanol is just not as energy-rich: A gallon of gasoline contains 116,090 BTUs of energy; a gallon of ethanol has only 76,000.
Yet pure ethanol has a 113 octane rating, far above that of gasoline. Octane is a measure of a fuel’s resistance to knocking at high temperature and pressure. That makes it ideal for performance engines such as those in the IndyCar circuit, which run on pure ethanol. It also enhances octane in gasoline, hence its use in Iowa’s super-unleaded, as well as in many other corn-producing states.
Regular cars don’t run on pure ethanol, but some are outfitted to run on an 85% ethanol-gasoline mix called E85. A Consumer Reports study showed that a sport utility vehicle running on E85 got 27% worse fuel economy than normal unleaded provided.
That energy deficit is among the arguments against ethanol. Elvin Anderson, a service technician at a Chevrolet dealership in Moab, Utah, frequently travels to Denver for work and pleasure. For the return trip, he has to fill up there with fuel that has a far higher ethanol content than in Utah.
“I can’t believe what a big difference it makes in fuel economy,” Anderson complained. “I lose about 50 miles per tank on the Denver gas.”
The Venture has a 20-gallon tank, so using ethanol-supplemented gas would cost us about 40 miles per tank, or about a gallon and a half of fuel. That works out to $6 lost by using ethanol rather than gas, compared with only $2 saved by filling the tank with the cheaper ethanol blend. After Iowa, we stuck with the lowest ethanol gas we could find.
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Fueling anxiety
Driving cross-country, we saw, over and over, the dramatic ways the price of gasoline affects people’s lives -- even those who don’t drive at all.
Gabriel Bravo, owner of a Mexican restaurant in Philadelphia, walks to work. But he said gas costs had driven up what he pays for food 50% or more, while his clientele has declined.
“People don’t want to drive to go out to dinner anymore,” Bravo said. “And now I have to raise the prices of my tacos to boot.”
On a balmy Saturday night, we finally reached Los Angeles, stopping to fill up for the last time. At $4.59 a gallon, it was our most expensive tank.
One memory from the trip lingered more than any other. Pulling into a Clark gas station in Middlebury, Ind., we were struck by a decaying jalopy of a pickup. It was rusty, misshapen and its tailpipe was dragging, literally.
Its owner, Ray Troyer, informed us that it was a 1966 Ford that got “about 6 or 7” miles per gallon. He’d love to upgrade to something more practical, but he’s worried about losing his job.
Troyer works on the line at Jayco, a recreational vehicle maker in nearby Goshen. The price of gas has brutalized the market for RVs, and Jayco recently had its first round of layoffs. In August, it closed its plant in nearby Twin Falls.
Troyer smiled grimly in the midday sun as the pump ticked toward $100.
“With gas where it is,” he said, “what future do I have?”
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