Gas Mileage

Since my car is now 12 years old and my daughter is getting her license in 2 weeks (yes, I am scared) I've been half-heartedly looking at cars. I say half-heartedly because over the summer I took the Dave Ramsey Financial Peace University classes and am really making an effort to get out of debt. On the good side I don't have much debt, except my mortgage, which seems huge to me, but on the bad side, with three teenage daughters there isn't much room to save anything. Especially the amount it would take to buy a car.

But that wasn't where I was going when I sat down to write this post. As you can probably guess from the title, I was going toward gas mileage. I remember the energy crisis of the 1970s when gas first started going up. Granted I wasn't paying much attention to gas mileage back then, but I also remember my parents buying a Toyota that got about 30 miles per gallon in about 1980.

That was 27 years ago. In 2007 the general consensus is still that 30 mpg is good gas mileage. Am I the only one who disagrees. Look at the computer industry, and the advances in speed and storage over the same time period. Look again at the prices, if anything they have gone down, especially when you compare what your money bought then and now. But the price of cars has doubled or tripled and we as consumers aren't expecting anything extra in the way of fuel efficiency for those dollars.

My daughter doesn't want to hear this, but I really don't want to buy a car until I can get one that gets 50 mpg at an affordable price. Riding a bike to work is looking better and better. Look at the benefits:

• It's good for the environment
• It's healthy (maybe I can lose that extra 25 pounds)
• It's good for my budget (right now I spend almost $200 a month just in gas)

Disadvantages:

• Time (but I walk about 1 1/2 hours a day already)
• Weather (on bad days I can drive)
• My kids and everyone else think I'm strange (but they already do, so what's new)

OK now I'm rambling, so it's time to get off my soap box and do something productive.