Driving by Numbers

29,403 miles – To be honest, it’s just not as many miles as I expected. This is the total miles driven in my Jeep, however. This doesn’t include many hours being in vehicles of hosts, trains, subways, planes, and even boats. Lots of travel time. Before the trip I was estimating closer to 40,000 miles, while others warned that I would probably hit 60,000.

$3,294.54 of gas – This was actually surprisingly close to my estimate of gas cost. Given that I drove fewer miles than my estimate, this is probably right on par to my estimate of gas cost. This is well-spent money. A lot can be accomplished with a few thousand dollars of gas money.

1251 gallons of gas – That’s a lot of gas, but not that much. After all, there are people that use that much gas in a year just commuting to work and back. Click this image to see a visual of 1200 gallons.

141 gas stations – That’s an average of stopping for gas just about three times per state. That would be a lot for Rhode Island, but not much at all for Texas. I should have a picture of every time I filled up to make a cool poster. This also means stopping for gas on an average of every 2.66 days throughout the trip.

30 days in a car – It’s difficult to estimate how many hours I spent in the driver seat of my car, but it’s probably at least an entire month of the trip was sitting in that seat, 1/12 of my time for an entire year. That doesn’t include the time spent in other cars or other modes of transportation. 1/12 of my year listening to music, having time to think of my trip, and relaxing. That’s not too bad.

23.5 miles per gallon – To my surprise this is a lot lower than my estimates through the trip. I had the digital readout on the dash and most of the time it seemed to be in the 25-28 region. Not the best gas mileage, but alright I suppose.

8.87 gallons per fill up – With a relatively small 12-gallon tank in the car my average stop at a gas station meant I was ¾ empty. However, there was one time on the trip where I put in 11.7 gallons of gas in Oklahoma City. So the closest I got to empty was 0.3 gallons of gas.

$2.634 per gallon – My average cost of gas was almost right on to my pre-trip estimate. Given the current prices the average could have been much higher. I did pretty well to average this. The cheapest gas was in Casper, WY at $2.07 and the most expensive was in Stamford, CT at $3.39.