Tool Helps Figure Payback When Chucking Gas-Guzzler
By John O'Dell June 30, 2008By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
My 1965 Mustang is about as clean-running as an old car can get, but it still spews far more pollutants and uses a whole lot more gasoline – I'm lucky to get 10 miles per gallon – than almost any passenger vehicle made today.
But it's a toy, a hobby car that gives me something to do with all my spare cash, and I don't drive it much – a few hundred miles a year. So I don't feel too badly about keeping it in my garage while I'm writing about the need for all of us to be greener motorists.
A lot of people, however, have older cars that are used every day, and many of those vehicles aren't very fuel efficient.
As gasoline prices soar and maybe, just maybe, as concern about the automobile's impact on global warming grows, many have begun thinking about trading in and up to a new (or newer) vehicle that's easier on fuel and the resulting emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the major greenhouse gases that can trap heat in the atmosphere.
Our national ineptitude with math can make it difficult (for some of us, at least) to do all the calculating it takes to compute just which model will give us the best bang for our buck -- the fuel savings payback.
Money Isn't Everything
As a result, a lot of people end up buying cars they think will save them money, only to find out that gas savings alone just won't do it. That's particularly true of many hybrids.
Of course, financial savings aren’t the only reason for buying a greener car. We need to remember that while cheaper gas bills are nice, air we can breathe, and a nation we can live in free from worries about who controls one of our chief energy sources, are much better benefits.
Still, there's nothing wrong with saving a buck when you can, and Edmunds.com provides a number of tools, such as True Market Value and True Cost to Own, that are designed to help you make the informed choices if you are thinking of changing vehicles.
Guzzler Payback
The newest is the just-launched gas guzzler trade-in calculator.
It's a neat little tool that lets you see quickly and effortlessly the official EPA combined city-highway fuel economy rating for your present vehicle – adjusted to reflect the tougher new 2008 standards that have made the ratings more reflective of reality – and for any vehicle, new or used, that you might be considering as a replacement.
The calculator also tells you the True Market Value of each vehicle in the region in which you reside, the difference between those two values, and the length of time it will take you to earn back the newer vehicle's price premium through fuel savings (presuming, of course, you are trading up to a vehicle that gets better gas mileage than the one you're driving now).
Even if you aren't in the market for a new vehicle, the calculator is useful for quickly computing things like fuel costs – you plug in the cost of whatever fuel (gas, diesel, ethanol) you are using, and the number of miles you drive each month -- and your actual fuel economy (rather than the EPA rating) so it gives you back real-world figures, not some national average that could be considerably higher, or lower, than your rear costs.
Computing CO2
One thing missing from the calculator is a tool that converts a vehicle's fuel consumption into CO2 emissions, but that's easy enough to do. Here's how:
Once you have the vehicle's real or EPA estimated fuel economy numbers, convert miles per gallon to gallons per 100 miles. (That's 100 divided by the miles per gallon figure – 25 mpg equals 4 gallons per 100 miles, or 100/25) Then multiply the gallons by 19.6 for gasoline and 22.4 for diesel. The final number is the pounds of CO2 per 100 miles that the vehicle emits.
And remember, you use a lot more gas at 75 mph than at 65 mph, so even if you never trade it in, you can get better mileage out of the gas guzzler you already drive by simply slowing down. You'll not only save only, you'll be also be a greener driver.
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