BehindTheLens

The latest buzzword to come out of the energy crises is Hypermiling. Essentially you tweak your car by over inflating the tires, placing cardboard on the radiator and drive like there’s a vial of high explosive in your car that will go off if you accelerate or brake too fast. Some of the ideas are common sense – keep your car tuned up and drive sensibly. Others a little off the deep end – like tailgating big rigs or not slowing down for turns. In essence, hypermiling is a good idea taken to the extreme.

Here’s a crazy though for you: Gas prices really aren’t all that bad! Crazy you say? Well, out of sheer boredom one day I decided to see just what the price of gas should be if government efforts to control the price never happened. In 1980, the average price of gas was $1.23 a gallon. If you apply the annual rate of inflation, the price of gasoline this year should be $3.03. Certainly that’s a bit shy of the $3.50 or more we are paying now, but the point is that if the price raised the same as the price of everything else it wouldn’t be making top-story billing on the evening news.

Somehow we never learned our lesson from that giant slap in the face commonly known as the Arab Oil Embargo of 1972. I remember the gas lines, shortages and price gouging that made headlines that year. The short-term solution was to flood the American auto market with fuel-efficient Japanese cars. Detroit eventually caught up, and the government added its own kick-in-the-seat with fuel economy standards. All well and good, but nobody with any authority had the foresight to come up with a plan to rely only on domestic energy sources and let China deal with the Middle East!

We didn’t get into this energy mess overnight, and anything we can collectively do to save on gasoline will buy more time for solutions to become commonplace. In the meantime, be reasonable…you may save a few gallons of gas tailgating a semi, but you’ll lose a lot more in repair bills when he comes to a sudden stop!