The skyrocketing price of gasoline is hurting everyone. Here in the US, the price of gasoline has risen more than a dollar a gallon in a single year and shows no signs of stopping. People now have to budget their gas money where before most of us paid for it with change out of our pockets and thought nothing of long drives on Sundays or going upstate to Grandma’s or the other side of town to visit friends on weekends.
Gone are the days of backyard hot rodders where the guys used to gather under the shade of the trees as they leaned over the open hoods of their cars and talked about the latest 4-barrel carb. configuration or the newest camera designs. Words like pop-up pistons, oversized valves, and stroker cranks were common parlance. All of them would make your car pack a lot of horsepower, and all of them would guarantee that you would stop at your friendly gas station three times as often.
People with RVs and big RVs are trying to sell them because they can’t afford gas to take long, far away vacations and all the guys who used to proudly drive their big V8-powered trucks with the big mud tires are trading them in for their smaller V6 or 4-cylinder counterparts. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that a vehicle that gets 24-30 mpg is better than one that only gets 10-14 mpg.
Cars like VW and Toyota are getting more and more popular these days, especially the old VW bugs that got 40 mpg. Other brands like Honda, Nissan, Kia, mini-cooper to name a few are also in the lineup. Not surprisingly, foreign automakers have surpassed sales of all American makes and models and many plants that make the largest American cars are closing their doors and going out of business.
The problem with electric cars is that the battery technology isn’t what it could be, and while they might be great for short jaunts around town, they’re not cut out for long trips. There is a huge push around the world to make cars that run on hydrogen or water and that seems like the best direction to take at the moment. Wouldn’t it be great to have a car that you could pump gas into with your garden hose? The Japanese already have a prototype that runs on distilled water, and hopefully they’ll soon have those cars available to the general public.
