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It’s that time of the week again.
Yesterday I filled up at $2.93 per gallon, bought 11.264 gallons and had traveled 394.3 miles since my last fill up, all of which equates to gas mileage of 35 mpg.
Based on my car’s average fuel economy of 29 miles per gallon, I was able to increase my gas mileage by a little under 21%, which equates to a savings of $6.93. Combining this weeks’ savings with my previous savings, I have saved $19.56 since I’ve started to make a conscious effort to save gas.
Spread that savings out over an entire year and I’m on pace to save $339.04 this year.
All things considered, I’d rather have that money in my bank account than give it to some huge oil company!
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Can you give us the formula to calculate savings? You know, how do you get the number $6 for saving and so on.
Sure. I supposed I should have done that in the first place..
Let’s say I get I get 20% better gas mileage than usual, and the average price of gas is $3.00 per gallon. What I do is multiply $3.00 by .20 and come up with $.60. This number is what I’m “saving” per each gallon of gas.
I then take $.60 and multiply by the number of gallons I filled my gas tank with.
So, let’s say I added 10 gallons of gas, I multiply 10 by $.60, coming up with a savings of $6.00.
Does it seem like I’m calculating it correctly?
Here’s how I calculate whether or not I got better gas mileage than usual.
When I fill up, I divide the number of miles my car has driven since the last fill up and divide it by the number of gallons I put into my car. Lets say I traveled 350 miles and put 10 gallons of gas in my car. I then got 35 mpg.
I know that the average gas mileage that my car had since I’ve owned it is 29 mpg, so I take the gas mileage for the latest fill up and subtract 29 from it.
In this case it’d be 35 – 29 = 6.
I then take that number and divide by 29 to get the percentage increase.
6/29 = about 21%
You could also calculate by doing the following:
Knowing that my car gets 29 mpg, I could just multiply that by the number of gallons I put in my car (to get the number of miles I should have gone) and then subtract that from the number of miles I actually went.
Then take that number and divide it by the MPG my car got between fill ups. Then take that number and multiply it by the current gas price to show how much money I saved.
Example:
29 mpg x 10 gallons = 290 miles
I drove 365 miles between fill ups
365 – 290 = 75
I got 36.5 mpg between fill ups
75 miles / 36.5 mpg = 2.05 gallons
2.05 gallons x $2.90 = $5.95
I don’t know if that makes more or less sense to do it that way.