And now for something completely different, here’s a chart of price/gallon and miles/gallon for my 2005 Acura sedan (which has since moved on). I was looking for something in my Google Drive and stumbled upon this old sheet.
I have no idea why I tracked this data. I also don’t think it is 100% reliable: obviously I missed some stops and might have mistyped a few of the values. But nonetheless I think it has some interesting insights:
- Price/gallon does trend up and miles/gallon trend down, which seems rational based on inflation and age of the car.
- Average price/gallon: $3.22 (the car “required” premium so that is normally what I pumped)
- Min price/gallon: $1.69 (12/10/08 – Rock Hill, MO)
- Max price/gallon: $4.36 (6/28/08 – Lexington, VA)
- Average miles/gallon: 24.55
- Min miles/gallon: 17.20 (12/19/08 – St. Louis, MO) – probably bad commutes
- Max miles/gallon: 34.05 (9/5/09 – North Carolina) – road-trip from STL to an NC Beach
- Total money spent on gas: $7,392.99
- Total gallons: 2,308.9126
This data covers 2007 – 2013 which includes time in three different states: Virginia > Missouri > North Carolina. Whenever I learn more about Google Sheets I’ll try to throw in some shading for the states, but that might explain the drop around Fall ’08…of course the giant recession might have had something to do with that as well. The spikes in MPG might come from highway trips which tend to provide better gas mileage as opposed to stop-and-go commuting traffic. The EPA estimates for the car were “Premium Gasoline – 23 combined city/highway MPG / 20 city / 28 highway 4.3 gals/100 miles”, which is about what I was getting.
Thaxton's Nerd Notes 