-J-P-L-

Wow. Anyone ever stop and think of the cost of gas used in a car's lifetime?

Well, I did a quick caculation for my '93 SC that averages around 18 mpg's.
So I have 241,000 miles on this bad boy and figuring today's average gas price of about $2.75 a gallon, $36,820.00 has traveled though my fuel lines.



This is one reason I hope to put my butt into a Toyota Yaris [sedan] in the next year or so.

genki

Wow. $2.75/gallon. Must be happy with gas prices over there. I average 14-16mpg mostly city driving in san francisco and gas prices here is $3.40/gallon.

-J-P-L-

Actually, regular in Mass right now is under $2.60/gal. I'm using $2.75 as and average from highs to lows. Also, I use Premium so that average is probably higher. However, I'm roughly factoring old gas prices of say $2/gal.

So with your figures, at 240,000 miles, you would have spent $54,400.00 on gas.

CK6Speed

iTrader: (1)

Hard to say because gas prices up until the late 90s were pretty low. Even in Hawaii we were paying about $1.89 for Premium during most of the late 80s early 90s when these cars in question where new. That means for more than half its life it had much cheaper gas. Only in the last 5-6 years has gas prices here gone insane as high as $4+ a gallon. But, it it still is pretty eye opening how much money is being spent on gas for a cars lifetime.

dreyfus

To put it in another light, the earth's circumference at the equator is 7,926 miles, so you've traveled about 30.5 times around the earth. You've been paying about $1,209 for each trip around the planet.

That's a lot of miles. Congratulations on getting you money out of your SC.

ntran18

iTrader: (27)

Actually the earth's circumference is ~23k miles at equator. So it costed ~$3500 for each of the 10+ trips around the planet.

rominl

iTrader: (4)

yup, i can't even imagine how much i spent on gas for our cars, including the gas hungry gs400, sc430, and is300.... sc430 is now gone (is300 gone long ago), and really time to trade the gs for a better gas efficient vehicle

thetopdog

Are you really going to be happy with a Yaris after driving an SC400 for so long? The SC400 is a beautiful car, luxurious and the 250hp is still pretty strong. I don't know if I would be able to make such a drastic downgrade, especially since you're not going to be saving THAT much money a year (~$1000 probably?) in gas. I'd rather pay the extra cash and drive a car that I love

-J-P-L-

I'm ready to go economy. For me right now, money is so tight that even a Yaris isn't possible. That's why I'm pushing my SC as far as I can without too many costly repairs. I've come to the point where reliability and efficiency are two priorities so that's why a new economy car rather than a higher mileage luxury car will be my next purchase. Hey, if I can step it up to a Civic, I will. But yeah, I'll be happy. There are things that a 15 year old car, even an SC, start to lack.

Oh, and just to clarify, I'm not the first owner of my SC. I've put the last 90K on it. I only bought it about 5 years ago. So I haven't paid for all that gas myself.

shern

iTrader: (6)

Throw in insurance and maintenance to be even more frightened.

Faymester

i look at it this way ... i like driving [not traffic obviously, but the actual driving] and before the IS i drove an envoy which broke often ... so, personally, i made a good move