Why aren't people complaining about gas prices?

You've never seen one before?

He's a Brit. They don't have them there. You'd probably blow a week's pay driving to work once, at least the gasoline-engined version.

edited 27th Mar '11 7:29:32 PM by Morven

They're not that bad... but not by much. And the y are ugly as sin.

My mom had an Explorer for a while, not quite so bad, and at least we've started tredning away from this◊.

Jesus, who seriously thought it'd be a good idea to make the Humvee commercial?

GM, apparently. They're all over the place in Hawaii.

SUV's and trucks are hugely popular here on Oahu, and we don't have a lot of need to go off-roading - Kawa'i, Lana'i and Moloka'i need that much more than we do here.

My parent's had a diesel excursion. Considering we are an outdoorsy type family and add in my family uses it for work and hauling things for house and yard work. Add into that the high capacity for passengers and it is a fairly nice vehicle. It is heavy and durable. But it can be hard on your fuel budget.

Yeah, but plenty of jerks used it for around town.

That's like using a moving van to deliver a pizza.

The biggest vehicle we have right now is a 1998 Range Rover, and while it's not as big as an Excursion (GVWR is somewhere around 6000 lb), it's still something of a gas guzzler at about 14 MPG city. My brother says it should be doing better than that and suspects some sort of fuel system problem, but no one's really taken the time to look at it.

Also, I would personally skip the Excursion and go straight for a moving van or a school bus. I've wanted to drive one of those big trucks since I was a kid, but have never gotten the chance. :D

I think that if we could swap school buses to electric that would be a big help.

Automating cars and stream lining roads would probably help more.

Yes, but a politician wouldn't get far on that platform.

Tuefel: 6.0 or 7.4 Diesel?

(I found it odd that the 6.0 produces more horsepower, or so says Wikipedia.)

We broke $4 a gallon. I'll probably be driving a bit less.

school's out so no more half hour commutes and a weightier wallet for me :P

I've got another month and a half left.

Summer driving season will kick off on the Memorial Day weekend. You will most likely see a spike in prices then. Oddly enough, I want a car with a V8 under the hood now, like a Crown Victoria.

Be careful with your masochist urges there, pvtnum.

No, if I really liked pain, I'd buy another GM product.

Since I like pain, I'll probably go find myself a beat-up Buick Roadmaster stationwagon with an LT1 under the hood. Mmmm, 5.7 liters of Small Block Chevy...

Well, Holden makes V-8 cars...

Anyways, Ford's line of Duratec and EcoBoost engines sounds intriguing. Aren't they Flex-Fuel?

Hmm, going off of That Other Wiki, it seems that quite a few Ford vehicles are Flex-Fuel.

edited 5th May '11 7:27:24 PM by RocketDude

Hey, what's the record for highest priced gas in the mainland U.S?

I was this close to scoring an LT1 Buick Roadmaster Estate wagon. Only 700 dollars. Wife said no, we can fix up the Park Avenue.

Sigh, I was really looking forward to driving a real car for a change.

Plus, 380 THOUSAND miles on the odometer. Yikes.

edited 11th May '11 2:55:43 PM by pvtnum11

That's a lot of driving for Hawaii, isn't it?

Age and mileage, it comes out to about seventy miles a day, roughly. Figure a thirty-five mile one-way trip to work and back, and yeah, that's possible. They might have lived on North Shore and worked in Honolulu or something.

Must have been lots of fun putting gas into that thing every three or four days... I can get by for two weeks on my daily commute of only twenty miles round trip.

we complain about it all the time, but it never goes anywhere. There's nothing to revolt against and at the end of the day, we all have to go to work. Well, some of us go at the beginning of the day, but for the most part, as long as you work, you have to use gas.

Europeans don't understand why we still need cheap gas. We're nowhere near as protected from the evils of corpratism. We don't have good social welfare systems, the prevailing philosophies are anti-union, and the government is owned outright by the corporations and banking systems. It used to be shady and under the table, but hte supreme court made it overt and acceptable.

People say that it's America and if we want change, just wait, but that's not the case. Our system makes it agonizingly HARD to change, even by revolt. Americans presented with a problem like the gas prices do what they are doing. they grumble and take it in the tail pipe simply because there is no way to fight what is going on. there is a ruling class in America that exists for the sole purpose of making money. They artificially boost our cost of living so that the people that are living on the margin can only make it day to day.

When people are working 40-80 hours per week without vacation or good bennies, and have to work even when sick because to miss a day means an inability to pay bills, when we can make 50,000 per year and have to live on the street because housing is too expensive, we don't fight it because we are too busy surviving.

People bash americans for being lazy and fat, but we are some of the hardest working people in the world. If we are fat it is because of cheap food being stuffed with fat and sugar while organics are out of the price range of everyday shoppers. Plus, when people are having to work with no breaks, high demands on the pocket book, and long hours, they can't ditch the cortisol in their systems. Sitting at desk jobs contributes to the problem, excess drinking or binge eating to numb the pain of our workweek is another problem. A lack of government funded public transportation is yet another problem, an urban sprawl plan that forces people to go more than two miles from their homes for goods is yet another problem.

Look, europeans and others with the exceptions of Russia, Canada, India and China have no concept of the VASTNESS of the country, the logistics. of putting together national rail, and linking metro areas together. We simply don't have the money to do it. Most cities don't even have the money to do more than add bus lines at the moment.

Where I am at, for example, the city was built up durin the era of the personal vehicle. Early on they had trolley lines, but they were done with by the early 20th century. The city is characterized by urban sprawl and light industrial now that the lead refining and the stockyards are gone. Industry here all food processing, telmarketing, aerospace, insurance, banking and investing, and tech now. The Irony of where I live is that it's a national HQ for a particular Rail company, and yet it has no commuter rail at all. It hasn't for a hundred years!

The result is that to get groceries and amenities, people have to go quite a ways. The roads don't have bike lanes or good sidewalks, and busses are erratic at best. people have to drive everywhere, and if you do not have a car or a liscense you are unable to get gainful employment. Job apps around here flat out ask you if you have a car, and if the answer is no, they won't hire you.

Anyway. gas prices are killing us. It's not just the gas directly, but the rise in food as a result. High diesel leads to higher electricity because coal, oil, and nuclear material comes by rail, which is all diesel. When the US hits $3.00 a gallon, the economy stops. At $4 a gallon, we're unsustainable. At $5 a gallon, we're imploding. It's not a matter of gluttony or low MPG cars. it's a matter of logistics and infrastructure.

That's why Obama pissed me off when he said that we're just going to have to deal with it because it's not getting better. He pretty much signed our death cert at that moment. We're toast unless we can pull the price of gas down to at least $2.00 per gallon, and oil down to $60 per barrel. We need to get everyone into cars that are better than 30 MPG, but we can't do it by expecting everyone to go out and get loans on $20,000 cars. Forget electric, they're running $40,000 around here. What needs to happen is more deisel cars and more government subsidies on biodeisel. We need to be able to field a safe and efficient car that can be worked on in the backyard and costs no more than $3000. If we can do that, we can entice the low income families to give up on their beaters. We keep them because they're affordable and fixable, unlike a new car.

What people SHOULDN'T do is riot on gas stations. There should be riots, but they should go to the corprate offices of the gas and oil companies. Gas stations are just a business staffed by low income joes. it's the corprates that should get the full ire of a frustrated populace. there should be demonstrations on Wall street, not the capitol building. The speculators and hedge fund managers are responsible for this latest run up. Congress is useless. They're in the corprate pockets and have nothing to do with the people anymore.

Gas prices here just fell down to below four bucks a gallon, but we've always been pretty high. It'll fall to high 3-something, stabilize, and we'll all think "gee, glad gas prices fell, right?" and it'll go up to even new heights the next time.

I remember gas in Hawaii being less than two bucks a gallon, and that was for premium, and I've only been driving here for 12 years (had no need for a car the first two years in the Army).

But yes - if we have to pay more for gas, we're having to cut out of something else, usually discretionary spending, but for those who are on an already tight budget (unemployed, underemployed, fixed income), it can really hurt.