mpgmotors.com Blog

The Blended Gas Mileage Spreadsheet

We get the full gamut of concerns or non-concerns about gas mileage with our products. MPG Motors, to some, stands for Miles Per Gallon Motors. To others, MPG Motors stands for Motorsports Performance Group where miles per gallon is their last concern. Honestly, both areas are interesting to me - fast and efficient.

Having said that, I’m also a big believer in doing both things (going quickly as possible as efficiently as possible) and not just talking about them. If you’re concerned about saving gas, save gas. If you want to go fast, go fast. If you want to do both you should at least consider a scooter or motorcycle - almost any scooter or motorcycle. Even large motorcyles average well above the cars most of us drive. The Honda GL1100 Goldwing I am using as a daily driver gets 41 mpg. The Hyosung GV and GT250’s can get up to 70 mpg in commuting service. Granted, the big fuel economy advantage of most scooters and motorcycles pale when you fill a five passenger car with five people when it can get 25 mpg. But (and this is a big BUT in my experience) almost no one drives with their cars full. Carpooling is not well supported even in areas where there are special incentives in an attempt to drive acceptance. Truth be told, I’ve never been able to work carpooling into my life. Hats off to the folks that can carpool, but I’ve never had a job in my life where rigid work hours would work for me.

No, most of us drive a car or truck all the time by ourselves and wish we had a better answer. Now, at MPG Motors we try to offer solutions that aren’t slow and do improve efficiency. I get just as excited when a customer walks in the door and tells me they live in a town, work nearby (but too far to walk) and the roads they travel support travel on a 50cc scooter. I get as fired up helping this customer as I do with a person that wants our biggest bikes. When their mission fits a 50cc profile, that means to me that the top average speed of the other traffic is somewhere in the 25-35 mph range without significant hills. We have a number of towns like these in the area - Doylestown, Quakertown, Dublin, Lansdale - yep fill in your town. Transportation requirements like these allow the smallest scooters to meet the requirement to move one person to their destination and preclude the speed difference that we see with bicycles on shared roads.

MPG Motors did the Great Doylestown Gas Mileage Test back in 2006 to show the folks in Doylestown and towns like Doylestown how small scooters work in our area. They work great but that may also not be your situation. So, one of my customers said I needed a spreadsheet to quantify the gas savings in dollars from using a scooter or motorcycle to *sorta* to *almost* replace their current vehicle. Some people use their bikes *a lot*. Jan Wieck used his TN’G Verona like that. We documented his usage last year here. Other folks are more summertime only riders. But, if you get even a little better mileage and you drive the scooter or motorcycle a little, you are still using less gas than you would have otherwise. And, this is a finer point, if your focus is just not using gas (as opposed to saving money) even driving a higher efficiency vehicle a little helps.

Now there are many articles (I read one tonight) talking negatively about the long payback period of higher efficiency vehicles due to the higher purchase prices of hybrid vehicles. While not free, scooters and motorcycles present a much less expensive form of high-efficiency vehicles than the current crop of hybrid cars. How much cheaper? I made a spreadsheet that you can get here.

You’ll need to know and change to your situation the following:

• The average price of gas (I set it to $3.00)
• The number of miles you drive in a year (I put in 12,500 - the accepted average)
• The gas mileage of your current vehicle and a motorcycle or scooter

Hammer those numbers over the ones there and see what your blended gas mileage cost would be and what you would save over continuing to use one vehicle for everything.

Welcome to the MPG Motors Blog!

We’ve started this MPG Motors blog to allow us to go into more depth on the various subjects that tend to get lightly covered and then later run over by new pages on the MPGmotors.com website. We are big believers in what we can do with our products in real settings that our customers encounter on our roads. We’ll use the blog to corral some of our thinking and use of the products we offer to you.