Not sure why I find this interesting, but here’s a breakdown of how expensive gas/diesel is here.
Current Diesel Price: 1.124
Current Gas Price: 1.184
There are more diesels here, so that’s the most common fuel. Now, those are in Euros. The current conversion rate is 1.3702 dollars per Euro, so factoring that in, we get these current prices in dollars:
Diesel in Dollars: 1.540
Gas in Dollars: 1.622
Doesn’t seem so bad, huh? Well, those are for a liter, not a gallon. A gallon is 3.785 liters. Getting that factored in:
Diesel per Gallon in Dollars: 5.83
Gas per Gallon in Dollars: 6.14
$3 per gallon doesn’t seem so bad, huh? The high cost is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the average fuel efficiency is much higher in Europe. A mid-size car here gets 47MPG highway and 36MPG city. A mid-size car in the US gets 27 highway and 21 city. SUVs (which don’t exist here, by the way) get more like 16MPG highway and 13MPG city, on average.
There’s your random information for the day. I’m sure there are at least 15 studies presenting different information. That’s the worst part about complex subjects, no one really has the faintest idea what’s going on, so it’s hard to get good data, so it’s super hard to draw conclusions. That’s not even thinking about complete data! Oy!
I just about fell over laughing when I returned and saw car commercials boasting 30mpg as being highly gas efficient. We had cars back in the day that could get 40mpg. In fact, we have a couple cars on our yard back home that could get around 40 if we repaired them into running condition.