The cost of gasoline

This an ill wind…

I’m thinking that in a year or two some good, one-owner, off lease BEVs and PHEVs will arrive on the market.
The growth in BEVs has been explosive but I’m not sure that infrastructure is keeping pace, and recessions in the past have resulted in the creation of a lot of new apartment dwellers.

Also, the human animal quickly forgets pain.
Our designer did that for a pretty good reason (multi-child households) but sometimes painful lessons do NOT make for lasting memories.
The last time gasoline got close to $4 a gallon was due to a supply disruption caused by ‘natural’ forces.
10 years later people were driving gas guzzlers again.

@ profit:
I’m agnostic about this, but there’s something of a lag time between the spot price for your crude flavor of choice and the pump price. For those who like to get into silly arguments about the difference between epidemic, pandemic, and endemic, It’s sort like the lag time between positivity rates and death rate.

I remember another Carteresque administration grappling with inflation and gas.
THEY also had a mismanaged foreign crisis to deal with, and THEY also threw lots of spaghetti on lots of walls to try and draw the eye away from the numbers on the pump….and in the grocery store…..and in department stores….and bank mortgage rates….

Pretty soon I predict that somebody will get the shovels out and dig up THIS old body:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crude_Oil_Windfall_Profit_Tax_Act_of_1980
It didn’t work for them…but hey….people will probably be buying gas guzzlers and tinkering with socialism again too.

Ecclesiastes 1:9.

 

have bev's grown explosively? what percent of registered vehicles, or sales?

 

In terms of growth, BEV sales were up 89% in 2021 over 2020. That type of growth could be called “explosive”.
It is starting at a very small percentage though.
The market share of BEVs in 2021 was about 3.5%.

If you add in plugin hybrids that number grows.

We have a long way to go, but we are getting there.

https://www.globalfleet.com/en/manufacturers/north-america/analysis/ev-market-share-modest-us-wave-coming

 

I can remember a funny mirror-image of that just since the 2008 crash.

During the several steady-but-not-rapid growth, low-interest, low-inflation years following the crash, I had one family member whose favored media sources were incessantly claiming a (huge! double-digit!) "real" inflation rate that the published BLS figures were supposedly lowballing. This despite what you could see just by looking around at the pump or the grocery or department stores or banks.

After years of those discussions, some time around 2014 or 2015, I dug out old grocery receipts, etc., from 2007/8, and some current ones from 2014 or '15, and sat down with this family member and we calculated what inflation rate they worked out to, and lo and behold, it was very close to the supposedly lowballed BLS published rate.

I guess if there were government functionaries somewhere who were publishing an artificially-low BLS inflation figure, as long as they were also coming into my house and editing my old shopping receipts to match it, and getting my bank balances to match those, it's all good.

 

It's not hard to see why your SO's kids don't understand your point of view. You advocate buying an old car with only 117 MPGe, a small battery and a skimpy 2.6 gallon gas tank. The cargo space is only 15CF, which is much smaller than even the Prius Prime. New price was what? $43000? And now it's $15,000 to $23,000 used with an 8 year old battery? Many Prime users get better than 5 miles per kWh, and cruise down the freeway at better than 60 MPG.

To convince her kids you'll probably need the same incentive. Give each of them a free car.

 

"my war with Entropy" post 43. Can't win that bro. Redefine terms of engagement.

 

People see high transient prices and forget the days they got 50% discounts a week later .

Ground Turkey is still $1.25 a tube, carrots are still a $1 a package, got green Bananas $0.19 /lb they ripened later that week
don’t like “expensive “ food buy different food.

Main trouble is if you enjoy eating at establishments, those are twice the price, gotta budget if you insist on 3 meals a day ordered out.

Also a good time to hit a diet

 

Let me get this straight... It was OK to use gas engine in the i3 for 110 miles despite getting only 31 MPG, but the Prius use of the ICE when it was appropriate at 60 MPG was unacceptable? And the range of the REX (70 miles) was OK, but the 600 mile range of the Prius was not? This just makes no sense. I do have to wonder why you bother with that piece of crap when you have a perfectly good model 3 sitting at home like driveway art. The Model 3 was not able to handle the extra load of the trailer? Not enough internal storage space?

 

'price gouging' never sticks, it's not even illegal. but congress always panders to their constituents, without ever actually doing anything, because they know there is nothing they can do.

 

what's the opposite of hypermiling, lead foot? anyone notice any change in driver habits? not me.
people want cheap gas, they don't want to alter their behavior

 

I've not noticed a lot of changes. The techniques work on EVs as well as ICE vehicles. I've played with the hypermile techniques in my Prius Prime and have found that I can use as little as 165 watt hours per mile by gentle acceleration, leaving big buffer zones and coasting to the red lights.

The opposite of hypermiling would have to be "side shows" where they drive around in circles, drifting so that the engine is working hard but the car is going nowhere.

Stop and go commute traffic is a close second. I once used half a tank of gas in San Francisco just to go the few miles from downtown to the bridge on-ramp. That was a 4x4 Ford F150 pickup, so it had a few strikes against it before hand.