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Comment by petcat | Hacker News Reader

Crazy how cheap gasoline is in USA. $4 is still basically half as much as anywhere in Europe even when there isn't a war.

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Driving isn't nearly as important in Europe though.

American households spend 16% of their income on transportation, while European 11% on average.

https://itdp.org/2024/01/24/high-cost-transportation-united-...

In absolute numbers the gap is considerably wider due to differences in salaries. And all that while cars and fuel are significantly cheaper in the US.

In the co-working space I rent there are around 50 parking spots and half as much bicycle stands. In the warm period between the solstices the latter is packed and I have trouble finding a stand.

I started cycling mostly because they removed the free gravel parking area not counted in the usual spots, but I've found I don't miss driving as much as I thought I would.

The majority (60-70%) of Europeans still commute by car. Distances might be shorter and their cars might use less fuel but on the whole its still more appealing option for most people (despite quite a few countries trying to actively change it by making it more expensive and leas convenient).

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Indeed they do, but out of convenience, not necessity. And I get it - I much prefer driving if the distance is more than say 7km or when it's raining or really cold or really hot.

That being said I estimate that in Europe people who genuinely need a car in their day-to-day lives are closer to 40-45% of all commuters. It was noticeable in the first days of the Hormuz Strait crisis, when the government fuel subsidies didn't kick in yet.

A big part of it is taxes, European countries tend to tax fuel pretty heavily.

If heating oil is still a thing where you are, compare its prices to diesel (especially historically). They’re nearly the same product, the difference is almost entirely fuel taxes.

We used to have red diesel for agricultural use which was tax exempt. So they added a coloring agent which would make your tank red and thus noticeable if you used it in a regular car.

In the UK, farm vehicles use a specially dyed Red Diesel, which is the same liquid with a chemical added to it to turn it red. It’s taxed at a much lower rate, so you’ll sometimes pass petrol stations selling two Diesel from two different pumps, one of which is around half the price of the other.

If you’re caught running red diesel on a normal carriageway, the penalty can be steep.

Apparently cat litter gets the red out and nobody ever gets dipped anyway

What could possibly go wrong :)

Filter your diesel through cat litter in your garage and fill up your £60k mercedes.

Feels like extra work I would really enjoy doing and also the wonderful smell.

And I can probably re-use the cat litter for pesticides, so i don't need to worry about disposing of it.

But otherwise i would probably recommend against it.

These are poor rural people so it's less a 60k Merc and more like a worthless Volvo that is somehow still running in 2026 AD

I'd say, let them have whatever fuel they prefer. These are not the tax-evaders we are looking for.

Truckers absolutely get dipped. Commuters less so

In Germany that red stuff is applied to all diesel, not only agricultural use.

And it's not the same liquid. From first principles maybe, but not after it has gone through the supply chain until it reaches you.

Anecdotical evidence from decades ago, when I had an oil-fired oven for heating. With a big barrel in the cellar, which you let fill by hose from a truck maybe once a year.

And hand pumped into a can every few days, and carried that up, to fill the tank of the oven. One year I was rather broke, and that barrel empty. And then came winter.

Thought I'd be smart, because it's just the 'same stuff', right?

Walked to the Aral maybe 200 meters away, filled a canister.

That 'same stuff' made the fire drum clog from the inside with the finest carbon, like those mushrooms which grow like disks from the side of trees.

That never happened with just oil. And that was normal Aral diesel, nothing special.

One can also notice a difference in smell with older cars. Just oil stinks more.

Americans also drive A LOT more than Europeans on average, and generally (is my suspicion at least) with a lot bigger/less efficient engines

Not too sure about the engines as of late. Bigger and heavier vehicles - yes, but still mostly rural/highway, and at way lower speeds than the EU. Overall, IMO it's just the distances involved.

Lot's of European cars have 3 cylinders instead of American V8.

The majority of American ICE vehicles are 4-cylinder, not 8.

There are almost no new vehicles in the US that still offer a V8. They exist, but make up a very small part of auto sales.

Not so much the efficiency of the engine but the weight and size of the vehicle. Almost all new cars in the US are turbo charged 4 cylinders if not hybrids or pure electric, but US consumers do prefer larger vehicles which are less aerodynamically efficient wnd heavier, which is really a direct result of the distance and reliance on the vehicle Americans have.

It's cheap but you also travel a lot in the US. Specially in the southern states because everything is so far.

Anecdotal reference, my children's school is roughly 3 miles, so I spend a gallon of gas every day with 2 round-trips.

That number was zero in Netherlands because all schools are either walkable or bike able.

Supermarkets and restaurants are 5 miles away easily.

Heck, my neighbor (door to door) is 0.4 miles.

> Anecdotal reference, my children's school is roughly 3 miles, so I spend a gallon of gas every day with 2 round-trips.

12mpg! What do you drive?

2019 CR-V

I can squeeze up to 40mpg on interstate if I drive slow (under 65mph) and it's typically about 20-25mpg within the city but the ride for School specifically, I'm not sure what's going on there.

Maybe its not truly 1 full gallon so not 12mpg but a little over that like ~18mpg.

Lots of EU people are now travelling longer distances due to housing prices and job relocations.

My last commute in Germany was 1.5 hr one way and some of my colleagues had 2.5 hr commutes. Hybrid hours though.

You're right. One of my friends in the Netherlands does has a 3 hour total commute over the day. It's insane.

> roughly 3 miles, so I spend a gallon of gas every day with 2 round-trips

You get 12mpg?

Two cold starts a day and a vehicle larger than a WW2 tank. Sounds believable.

Hahahaha no, its a 2019 CR-V. I explained it in another comment. Maybe it has to do with that journey specifically?

> You get 12mpg?

It's the USA, so he's probably dropping the kids to school in a pickup truck...

12gpm

Even big pickups get better mileage than 12mpg

Some do, some don't. As a concrete example, the F150 [1] pretty reliably doesn't. Big SUVs like the Jeep Wrangler can be pretty far down there too.

[1]: https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/50104.shtml

Oh interesting, I had thought the F150 was one of the better ones but I obviously need to update my priors. Thanks for the link!

Depends on the model. The example given is the most inefficient model.

To be fair, even the most efficient hybrid f150 only gets up to 23mpg. The raptor is the worst, but none of the models are great.

That is surprisingly bad. My substantially larger Ram 3500 dually gets 15mpg even when loaded with 4000lb of cargo in the bed. Towing a trailer I get about 14mpg, unless there is a substantial headwind (since the trailer is much taller than the truck), that is the only scenario where it drops to near 12mpg.

The example you gave is the Ford F150 Raptor which is an enthusiast model for off roading that is extra inefficient and I wouldn’t call the Jeep Wrangler a “big SUV” but it is an incredibly fuel inefficient one with terrible aerodynamics.

In metric, 19.2km of driving burns 4.5 litres of petrol?

Is that right? That seems absurdly high even for a large ute.

He must take his kids to school on a 18-wheeler.

I believe semi-trucks are more like 7-9 mpg, but diesel and gasoline have different energy levels, so it's not an exact comparison.

US gallon is 3.8 litres. Even so, that's pretty inefficient.

3 miles is less than 5km. Perfectly fine by bicycle. Oh wait.. I guess you have too much freedom and no infrastructure other than highways so you gotta drive and burn all the fuel, time and money.

I live in the EU: I pay at least half my income in taxes, have less freedom due to insane bureaucracy, and the infrastructure around me isn't great (highways or pedestrian/bicycle). On top of that, fuel is double what it is in the US.

Whatever shortcomings there are in US society, it's not perfect in the EU either. That US freedom and infrastructure looks OK to me.

If gas was free for EU, we'd still pay more than US for it, by the sheer amount of taxes. 25-30% of current price is gas cost itself, raw cost, the rest is taxes.

So if EU somehow magically got the same amount of gas for 100% free, we'd at most pay some 25% less than we do now, and it would still be more expensive than US.

Only if you can afford it. And if you could, you could do that in Europe, too :-)

I rode my bike to school as a kid in the US. Kids still ride their bikes to school and to the parks/pool, I see them riding by my house every day.

This weird jingoism serves no one.

Brother, I live in Austin. It's 40C outside and my kids are very young.

We do have bike paths over that routes but it's just not safe for my kids yet. The road they need to bike along allows up to 65mph.

In the Netherlands I just had to cross a 30km/h road (down to 20km during school hours and pedestrians always get first preference) to drop them. Netherlands is just too satisfactorily safe ♥

True although a big component of the energy prices in Europe are due to policy driven taxation. There is a huge difference in intra EU petrol prices from around 6$/gal to 10$/gal.

Well the US could just pump their wells and outproduce the entire rest of the world in crude oil and refined products like gasoline if it wanted to. Or if it was forced to.

Isn’t that what it already does? At least in 2025 the numbers I see have the US as the top producer

> Well the US could just pump their wells and outproduce the entire rest of the world in crude oil

The US is already the largest producer of crude oil in the world.

They took first place around 2018 and is currently ~30% above no. 2 (Saudi Arabia).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_extra...

There's a Jevons Paradox type thing where they ended up spending roughly the same to travel a mile due to Japan or the EU pushing for efficiency due to needing to import the fuel (might be visible in California too due to them fighting their geography that causes smog).

Possibly the EU is pulling ahead on price per mile now with the shift to EVs.

Wait until you hear about German electricity prices...

(household elec is about 30-35c/kWh, public charging stations for electric cars often charge 60-70c/kWh, no joke, although I think some vendors now offer 40c charging with a subscription)

Those household prices should still put a German EV substantially ahead of the average new US vehicle in fuel cost per mile.

If they did all their charging at 70 they'd probably lose on cost to a US car (or a German diesel) but be equal to a German petrol car.

I think Germany has a cultural thing with smart meters which are mandatory for the ultra cheap charging available in many EU countries but it appears that you can get still those rates in Germany and pay about half what you quote, expanding the gap with the average US cost per mile.

You're comparing EV charging prices to US fuel prices though, that's not a fair comparison. I live in the US and have an electric car, which I charge at home on my municipal's grid. The rate is a whopping 10.5¢ per kw/h.

That’s what I pay in Connecticut for electricity. I believe most of New England and California are in the price range.

I’ve got a Prius Prime and only at around $4+ a gallon does it start to become cheaper to charge than just use gas since the gas engine is so efficient.

Does Germany have anything similar to the cheap off-peak electricity tariffs we get in the UK? Generally 6-10c/kWh.

Yes. Would currently be "free" (<1c/kWh) around 1400-1530 tomorrow, and go up to ~15c/kWh at night. Fixed costs might distort everything significantly though.

Wait until you hear about California electricity prices...

This is from a recent PG&E bill from my house:

Peak pricing: 0.48575 delivery + 0.14920 generation = $0.635 kWh

It seems to have gone down a bit this year though. These are the numbers from 2024:

Peak pricing: 0.53 + 0.183 = $0.71 kWh

> Crazy how cheap gasoline is in USA.

1 USgal is 3.78L, and so US$ 4/gal is a little under $1/L. Convenient comparison page:

* https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline_prices/

yep, that' like 0.92 EUR per liter and in Germany average price is around 2.3 EUR per liter

Yes, taxes. This is more a philosophical thing, high taxes, high cohesion society, low taxes, everyone on their own. Germany especially after WW2 made the decision for a high cohesion, compromise society (which looks to be at it's end - not society, but high cohesion and solidarity, many want lower taxes).

Lately it feels like in Germany people are paying high taxes, but still everyone is on their own.

It's not cheap when your budgeting depended on how much it cost before. Americans are mostly poor, however else we look to you across the ocean.

We don't have cool trains and double-deckers that you guys are accustomed to. Different can of worms, I know. Our own doing.

And your point is what exactly?

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