Think U.S. Gas Prices at $5 a Gallon Are Bad? Try $10

This car has Audi's "energy recuperation system", which is actually a "mild hybrid" system but you'll never see those words on the website or Monroney or any advertising - "mild hybrid" has a terrible public reputation despite the fact that it works (but doesn't have much of an effect on the EPA test cycle). Almost every single Audi (and Volvo) sold in the US has this system. It is also the base model, so the tires and wheels are the base 18-inchers which weigh a LOT less than the 20+ inch wheels that everyone loves (and kill fuel economy). The transmission gear ratios are perfectly matched for the speeds I choose. I use high-quality gasoline from Costco, etc.

Go read other people on Audiworld or other forums. I'm not an outlier. These modern turbo engines are great for highway cruising, but drink fuel like it's free if you want "spirited driving".

If you put it in cruise and don't go fast I can hit just under 40 - but I've only had it for a couple months. This is for a 21/28 rated vehicle. Forum posts seem to validate this as well.

City driving it's exactly what you'd expect - couple miles under EPA estimates.

Edit: this is manually calculated, but with a sample size of one. Strangely the onboard computer seems to underestimate in this vehicle, which is the exact opposite of every other car I've driven. Probably the most unexpected bit of owning this car so far.

Which is perfectly rational. Why drive a car you don't want out of fear that gas prices may someday go up?

The real solution is crank gas taxes up so high that the little people are forced to buy little cars or take the bus, like we think they ought to be doing.

And that, there, is the problem. Everywhere in the US is designed, often in legally-enforceable ways, to ensure that cars are prioritized over everything else.

We don't have transit for a number of reasons, one is that everything would have to be torn up and rebuilt for high speed rail. Two we have a much lower trust society than places like Europe and Japan. Three it's just so unprofitable and people dislike it so much it never gets funding.

> I prefer the freedom of my personal vehicle.

You're not at odds with each other, allowing multiple methods of transit doesn't encroach on your freedom to drive a car.

Private automobiles aren't a bugfix on urban planning, as someone posted to Mastodon recently, they're the determining cause of sprawl patterns. Personal vehicles, cheap fuel, and high-quality uncongested roads cheapen distance and through the Jevons Paradox increase the amount of space used.

https://mastodon.social/@CarlMuckenhoupt/108465959449696924

Light rail works great ... in reasonably dense urban environments and downtowns. If you have to walk only a few blocks to and from your boarding and disembarking points, they're great. Multi-link travel with transfers and delays is abysmal.

LRT also benefits heavily from dedicated rights of way, no roadway contention from other vehicles, traffic signals optimisation, and the rest.

And a single LRV can replace 40 -- 150+ vehicles on the road, depending on fill capacity.

Looking at the data [1], that's probably not the reason. Sanctions on Russia, combined with the outlook of lower demand in the future, make short-term investments in increased production capacities unfeasible: [2]

> the biggest firms have so far stuck with investment plans forged before prices really soared, choosing to put the windfalls primarily toward shareholder payouts, rather than extra production.

> Investors are pushing companies to share profits now, instead of making long term investments, given uncertainty over demand as the world pushes to shift away from fossil fuels

[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61446317

I think this is an easy statement to substantiate, and I believe it'd set a foundation as it derails to a moot point the moment a conclusion is derived from your own speculation.

> Total petroleum net exports were about 0.16 million b/d in 2021, and total petroleum net exports in 2020 were 0.63 million b/d.

We also import a lot of oil, because the nation is enormous and consists of multiple markets. But we are importing less than we were 10-20 years ago. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=M...

Whether the balance is slightly above or below zero cannot be all that important.

We produce more barrels of oil today than in the previous administration. Granted, it's a marginal amount more on a daily basis, but it's still more, and by quite a bit over the year. We have actually seen nothing but upticks in oil production in the US since the Obama admin. Not because the Obama admin encouraged it, but because the world price of a barrel of oil became high enough to warrant exploiting harder to reach and extract oil deposits.

Gas today typically contains 10% bioethanol, and that number is expected to increase in the future. The goal is to burn less fossil fuel, which is a good thing.

Problem is: bioethanol often comes from sugar beet or cane, we literally run our cars on processed food. For Diesel, it is typically mixed with vegetable oil, again, burning food.

There is hope that one day, we will be able to make biofuel in a way that don't compete with food production, but we are not there yet. There are some successful experiments, but nothing at scale.