Even at Today’s High Gas Prices, Driving Is Extremely Cheap
The price that matters is how long you have to work to drive your car 100 miles
“Gas prices are the highest they’ve ever been!” screamed a recent headline in the Los Angeles Times. “Pain at the pump drives Biden’s suffering in the polls!” trumpeted Politico. Really? About time to remind folks that by historical standards, it’s still pretty cheap to drive your car.
How could that be? Let me explain.
Being older than most people who will read this, I can remember when I could fuel up my first car, a ’46 Plymouth, for 25 cents a gallon. The good old days? Think about it. That old Plymouth, with its underpowered straight-six engine and 3200 pound curb weight, only got 15 miles per gallon, and my summer job driving a farm truck paid just $1 an hour. Do the math, and you’ll see that means I had to work exactly 100 minutes — the better part of two hours — to buy enough gas to drive 100 miles.
By any common-sense standard, that is the real cost of gasoline — the number of minutes you have to work to drive your car 100 miles. By that standard, the good old days of cheap gas don’t look so good after all.
Go farther back, and it gets even worse. A hundred years ago, your great-grandpa probably drove a…
