Driving for Dollars

This is the time of year when I start getting tired of driving, my right leg starts to hurt, and I look forward to the summer. This happens to me every year, and then by August I’m ready to start in again. I drive between 30k and 40k miles a year, which is a huge amount of time on the road. If you do the math, and conservatively say you are driving 1 minute for every mile, 40k miles a year comes out to 666 hours of driving. That’s over 27 days or nearly a month out of every year driving. Scary. One year when I was doing my taxes I just happened on two coincidental numbers: I had made $40k before deductions etc. and had driven 40k miles. Looking at it like that made it seem as I though I was being paid to drive, and at the rate of $1 per mile. This was a fairly depressing revelation, but somehow I still enjoy it.

My wife Meredith (another panelist on this discussion) and I have been fueling our diesel cars with straight vegetable oil (SVO) for the last 3 years. This cuts way down on gas expenses, and has made for some other interesting problems, but so far, we’re happy with the results. We have been through a few cars to find the best solution for us, including a 1981 Volkswagon pick-up which was kind of a nightmare, two 1981 Mercedes 240 Ds which were great cars, ran great on SVO, but were just too old. We wanted anti-lock brakes and airbags, so now we’re driving two Volkswagon TDIs (both diesels of course). Both cars run great on SVO. We’ve got over 30k on SVO on the 2001 Golf TDI and over 20k miles on SVO on the 2003 Jetta TDI.

Eating poorly on the road is a quick fix that I find all too easy. I have been getting a little better about it, but there’s room for improvement in my diet. We’re vegetarians, which limits our fast food choices, but most of the meat-free fast food is pretty bad too.

For now I’ll keep on driving and hope that I can use my cruise control.