An Englishman In America

Welcome to European pricing.

According to gas price comparison websites the average cost of a gallon of gas in the United States right now is around $2.98. The highest price is over $3.60 and over the last few days there have been spotty reports of individual gas stations boosting prices up to just below $4 per gallon.

Recently, some analysts have been predicting the current, continuing and escalating conflict in the Middle East will eventually lead to AVERAGE gas prices topping the $4 a gallon mark possibly a lot sooner than expected.

Scary huh?

Well, maybe for anyone used to seeing gas priced so low but not for a recently repatriated Englishman. I’m still enjoying what to my mind is half price petrol.

If anyone European seems somewhat uninterested and perhaps unsympathetic there’s a pretty good reason – unleaded petrol prices in the UK are currently priced at the equivalent of $6.84 per gallon and that’s pretty typical for Europe in general.

And prices are rising there too.

“OMG! How do you cope over there?” Is pretty much the reaction I received when announcing this fact at a recent obligatory family group grumble following a news report about continuing rising gas prices.

How do we cope? We buy normal sized cars, not hulking great beasts which average 15-20 miles per gallon. My last car back in England did around 45 mpg, my parent’s car closer to 60 mpg. In the U.S. I see car commercials boasting their fuel consumption rate of 20-25 mpg as a good thing.

My current vehicle here in the U.S. (a hand-me-down 1999 Dodge Caravan) does around 21mpg according http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/15418.shtml and probably performs worse now it’s older and that seems about average for a typical American car which is somewhat horrific by comarison…or would be, if I could stop looking at those prices compared to what I have been used to paying all my life.

Regardless of how difficult it is for me to care ‘too much’ about these gas price hikes I do understand there are differences which make rises in U.S. gas costs slightly more painful than elsewhere.

One thing you learn when you move to the U.S. is that things are no longer ‘close by’ as they once were. A trip to Costco can send you 30 miles out of your way and that’s considered close by. A family visit might send you 200 – 300 miles out of state and no one even flinches at the prospect of making the trip.

It’s a state of mind which certainly doesn’t exist in the UK. You can have relatives 50 miles away and consider them too far away to visit very often. Here in the U.S. my brother-in-law makes a 600 mile round trip every other weekend to come visit without flinching.

Maybe this state of mind has a lot to do with gas prices. European prices don’t encourage you to travel out of your way too much, U.S. prices have never encouraged people to think about it until now.

It’s the same with vehicle ownership. Head to Europe and you see a lot more smaller, fuel efficient cars and not the proliferation of SUV’s, trucks and other gas guzzlers you become accustomed to seeing here.

If gas prices continue to rise and start to fall in line with many other countries around the world will Americans be able to continue this kind of love affair with the automobile? I strongly suspect not. Whether it’s smaller cars, more fuel efficent vehicles, hybrid cars or just travelling less, something has to give.