One of my major goals with "Greener Transportation" is to address the extent of our global addiction to oil and it's by-products: heating oil for homes, and gasoline for automobiles of every kind [trucks, cars, heavy equipment, etc.]. Oil has simply become an untenable addiction, and in many cases makes no sense at all. We're damaging peoples' abilities to participate in the economy, save for our childrens' futures, and purchase the items, trips, etc., that we need and want to. In short, the high price of oil and its byproducts and deliteriously damaging the global economy. One of the subjects that many journalistic outlets seem to avoid like the plague, is the correlation to the rise of gasoline prices to the $4.00+ threshold to the global recession/depression which started mid-2007. I'm not saying that this price rise was solely responsible for the global meltdown, but it was definitely a large contributing factor.
Let's say you're a family of five, with a couple of pre-driving age children, two parents who work, and both drive to and from work each weekday, and you have a teenager who needs a car several times a week to get to his after school part-time job, as well as school extra-curricular events. In this scenario, this family has three vehicles. Now let's say gas is $4.00 per gallon, and that each car is filled up three times per month. Car number one has a 20 gallon fuel tank, so filling it three times per month costs $240. This particular SUV/Truck getsa combined 15 mpg, and is able to drive about 900 miles on these three tanks of gas [a not uncommon case]. Next car number two has a 14 gallon fuel tank and needs Premium unleaded [a foreign luxury car - Audi, again not uncommon]. Premium unleaded costs $4.30 per gallon. This car drives 45 miles roundtrip five days a week, or 225 miles per week, plus 75 miles on the weekend, for a total of 300 miles per week or 1200 miles per month. This car gets 27 miles per gallon. So it would need 44.5 gallon of premium unleaded per month at a cost of just under $192. Car number three [ a Scion tC], uses regular unleaded, like car number one. It has a 12 gallon fuel tank. It gets 24 mpg combined. It travels 30 miles roundtrip to and from work 5 days a week, for a total of 150 miles a week or 600 miles per month. It also travels 50 miles per weekend, for a total of 800 miles per month. Its fuel costs are approximately $133 per month. So this American family pays $565 per month just to fuel their 3 vehicles. This amounts to $6,780 per year in fuel costs alone for these three family members. Then there are yearly licensing tabs, insurance, maintenance, repairs, etc.
Just as a simple comparison, at current Seattle City light rates, it would cost an owner of a NEV [Neighborhood Electric Vehicle] $330 FOR 10,000 miles !!! Let's say this car travels 800 miles per month, just like the gasoline burning car number three above, then it would need about $27 per month to drive as many miles as car numer three above, which needs to spend $133 to travel the same distance, or about 1/5 as much money. If this family had 3 NEVs instead of gasoline burning vehicles, they could save [or invest in their childrens' college funds, take a trip to Tahiti, etc.] to the tune of about $5,800 per year in fuel costs !!! It would only cost this family about $1,000 per year to drive the same amount of miles ! But better yet, this family wouldn't use about 1650 gallons of gasoline per year. If you multiply this by one million people who might switch to NEVs or freeway legal all-electric vehicles like the Nissan Leaf [http://www.nissanusa.com/leaf-electric-car/index#/leaf-electric-car/index], and we could forego using 1 billion 650 million gallons of gasoline per year !!!
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