I recently read this great article on MSN.com (of all places!) regarding the new way to calculate a vehicle’s gasoline efficiency – not the Miles Per Gallon we’re all accustomed to but Miles Per Dollar. Writer Lawrence Ulrich admits that this fluctuates more than mpg since the price of a gallon of gasoline changes daily, but perhaps it would be more effective in making car-dependent segments of our society (hello Los Angeles!) review their dependence and efficiency.

After reading this article, I stopped to calculate our car’s efficiency. We have a ’99 Ford Mustang with a V-6 engine I got back in 2002 at a ridiculously great price despite the car being in near-mint condition. This is our sole vehicle. We get an average of 21 mpg around town, which is pathetic, I know. More on that in a later post.

I found a handy-dandy Google gadget that calculated this for me; at 21 mpg and the local regular gas at $3.25/gallon for regular unleaded, it costs me $1 to get 6.46 miles for gasoline alone to my great and unhappy surprise. 6.46 mpd. Oh. My. Goodness. Looking at it this way made me consider some of those regular trips:

• A trip to my parents place some 35 miles away, round trip: $12
• My local Trader Joe’s: about $1
• Daily commute for my Husband to get to work, come home for lunch, back to work and home again that evening: just under $5. ($2.38 is for the round-trip home is still cheaper than any lunch he can buy and it gets him out of the office, a homemade meal and an hour and a half with me!)

That really does make one rethink driving to the corner market for a gallon of milk.

Better still is the actual cost of driving a mile, not just for gasoline, but tires, maintenance, insurance, etc. AAA estimates that for my vehicle, for example, costs me $0.618 per mile. Let’s look at that relative to my list:

• A trip to my parents place some 35 miles away, round trip: $43.26
• My local Trader Joe’s: $4.33
• Daily commute for my Husband to get to work, come home for lunch, back to work and home again that evening: $17.30

Ouch!

And that’s only the monetary damage to my wallet – that’s not including any carbon emissions and various ways that cars pollute. Sometimes, it takes a pain in the wallet to fix a pain in the environment.

Just a thought.