The big news over the past few weeks, if you overlook all that little stuff about folks voting, is the economy.
Americans across the country are waiting with their hands out on their soon-to-be-promised “economic stimulus” checks. The amount of each check may still be up in the air – will it be $300? $600? $1000? - but what we do know is that the government will hope that pumping tens of billions back into the hands of consumers will stave off major damage that this recession will bring.
Let's face it. Whether or not you like the idea of the economic stimulus package, we'd all like to have a few hundred more dollars in our pockets to spend (or save) each year. But what if you could do that on your own? And what if millions of other Americans did it, too?
If you're one of the 15 million Americans who plan to buy a new car this year, you can. It's easy. Buy a car that gets good gas mileage.
Did you know that the average passenger vehicle in the U.S. gets 20.4 mpg? CAFE standards set back in 1975 require 27.5 mpg for passenger cars, and 20.7 mpg for light trucks. Yet our average miles-per-gallon today is a pathetic 20.4 mpg.
Let's say you're an average driver, putting 15,000 miles on your car annual. We can visit fueleconomy.gov, a nifty website that lets you compare gas mileage, energy imprints, and carbon footprints of just about any car, and see what your annual fuel costs will be. Here's just a few:
Vehicle | Combined MPG | Annual Fuel Cost |
Cadillac Escalade 2WD | 14 mpg | $3534 |
Ford Escape FWD | 20 mpg | $2303 |
Hyundai Elantra | 28 mpg | $1644 |
Toyota Prius | 46 mpg | $999 |
If we review our chart, we can see that the soccer mom who drives the Escalade spends $2535 more each year than the soccer mom who drives the Prius. In other words, the Prius driver has over $2500 more than the Escalade driver each year to spend on all those discretionary items that the government wants us to run out and buy with our rebate checks. That's over $200 each month that the Prius driver can spend on dinners, or movies, or toys for their kids. Heck, they could even save it .
If we compare gas savings on the Prius to the Escape - the car that gets the national average mpg – that's $1304 annually that the Prius driver is pumping into the economy, instead of their gas tank. The Elantra driver is putting $659 more into the economy than the Escape driver. That's roughly the same amount that the government wants to give us to "stimulate the economy." And the Escalade driver? No comment.
We won't all be running out to buy new cars this year. But if you are considering it, think about what you can do to stimulate not only your own household economy, but also our country's, if you reject the gas guzzlers. And if ten milliion car buyers chose the 28-mpg car over the 20-mpg car? That's more than six billion dollars that would be pumped into our economy instead of fuel tanks. And each year that more people kick the gas guzzlers to the curb, the economic stimulus increases.
We've seen chatter that we haven't been asked to sacrifice at all for our country, and so many of us would be willing to do so. Let's sacrifice the gas guzzlers in the interest of economic and national security.