Gas Savings? Sure!

Well, you hear about "gas savings" as one of the reasons people start riding motorcycles instead of their cars when commuting back and forth from work. It was, one of the main reasons I had gotten the go-ahead from my loving wife to buy a motorcycle as my main commuter vehicle since my car is quite the gas guzzler; she's got a V8 engine from 1987 after all!

Her name is Liesl

On a "good" week, my car would get perhaps 16mpg, whereas on a bad week she would get 11-14mpg. On the other hand, my motorcycle gets 40mpg on a bad week. You can see the disparity there. Of course, the fact that Liesl's engine is 5.6 liters vs Maria's 1.15 Liters....

I looked up maintenance records today and turns out I had changed the oil both on the motorcycle and on the car same day: 21JUL07. At the time, my car had 152, 138 miles on the odometer and the motorcycle had 36,000 miles on its odometer.

Since that day, I've put a grand total of 31 miles on the car and 8843 miles on the motorcycle! Can you tell which vehicle I prefer to ride? : )

So, back to the "savings" theme for this posting. I did some quick math calculations and just counting work commuting miles I came up with a total of 3872 miles which I would have had to drive from 21JUL07 till today for work.

The cost of gas, at $3.00/gallon as an average for premium gas which is what both vehicles demand came to roughly $829 for the car and $290 for the motorcycle to cover that work mileage.

"Well!" You say: "there's some obvious savings!"

However, remember that I wrote I had put 8843 miles on the motorcycle since 21JUL07? That represents about 4971 miles of pleasure riding on the motorcycle on weekends and such. That pleasure riding then cost me about $373 in additional gas money. Add that up to the cost for work commuting on the motorcycle and it comes to about $663.

So, once you do the final numbers, I save perhaps $166 in gas money after all is said and done.

I think I'll sum it up this way, a la the MasterCard commercials:

Gas Money to run the car back and forth to work: $829

Gas Money to run the motorcycle back and forth to work AND play: $663

Pleasure and enjoyment derived from riding a motorcycle vs driving a cage: PRICELESS!!!