So for a while now, I’ve been keeping track of how much it costs me to buy gas, and the average distance between fill-ups. The idea being, that, after a while, I can characterize the performance of my car.
(Ugh… forgive the crummy photo, I only wanted to get the idea across.. but in case that didn’t happen… those are gas receipts…. 🙂
I decided it would be good to update the Excel spreadsheet again (last time was November 2003).
The results? Since October 2002, I’ve filled up my tank 74 times. On average, I drive 235 miles between fill-ups, put in 9.735 gallons of gas, and spend $16.26 doing so (a rate of $1.625/gallon). That’s an average gas mileage of 24.13 miles/gallon. Okay, but not great by any means. (For comparison purposes, the car is a compact sedan from 1995.)
I plotted a few graphs with the data, but the most interesting one was price/gallon vs. time. There were a few very solid peaks and valleys in the graph. Which of course got me wondering about the influence of the political situation on the gas prices. So I went out and found a timeline of events in Iraq. A few timelines, actually, since none of them had all the dates I needed. Anyhow, the result is below; click on it for a bigger version. Breaks in the line are where I’d lost a receipt.
So, as the go-ahead is given for war or continued occupation, the price of gas goes down. It goes up again as casualties rise. Not too surprising, I guess 🙂
References:
- http://www.ringnebula.com/Oil/Timeline-Iraq_040903c.htm
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/page/0,12438,793802,00.html
- http://www.infoplease.com/spot/iraqtimeline2.html
Comments
10 responses to “The price of gas and politics”
you are such a cheapskate, that is all you’ve proven! gas in Europe is so much more expensive -Eric
?! i’m not complaining. that wasn’t my angle with this post at all. i was trying to show a relationship which isn’t necessarily immediately apparent.
sharpen
by the way, eric, you’re only proving that you’re being fleeced much worse than anyone in the world for gas .. nice one .. but we already knew that ..
FYI, Eric lives in Sarasota. If by “sharpen” you mean the graph, you can click on the pic for a bigger (and clearer) view.
With this post I was hoping to do two things: (1) give an idea of how much gas prices have fluxuated in Sarasota over the past two years and (2) show how the changes correspond to political events, especially those going on in Iraq.
i think what would be really helpful is if you added to the chart a red line showing the avg. $/barrel in the world market at the time. That would be very interesting to see if the gap widened. I know the barrel price has dropped significantly recently, so I think we’d see a real gap between your blue line a red line (the fleeceing zone in a political context, even though that wasn’t your original purpose).
hmm, good idea. now, to find some data…
ubergeek!
just like the rest of us. great project krishen.
Krishen, I was thinking about it: gas is like $40 -$80 a barrel or something like that, so we’d probably have to cut it down to some dollar amount that fits on the graph. like per gallon or divide by 100 or something, dunno. anyway, if you get the data and include it somehow, I’d like to refer the chart around (crediting you of course)
I’ve been having a little trouble finding crude prices. I did find this from the Canadian government, but it’s in Canadian dollars and in meters-cubed. I’m already have enough trying to figure out how many gallons a barrel contains. It looks like similar data is supposed to be available at http://www.eia.doe.gov, but all I can reach is Google’s cache of the site. *grumble*