Annual US Gas Saved Due to Prius Choice

Ties a bit to similar thread here: http://priuschat.com/forums/prius-main-forum/48203-barrels-oil-per-year-saved-prius.html

But I had the thought today that despite seeing many more Prii on the road than we did 4 years ago that they still represent a darn small portion of the vehicles on the street. But then I thought...."Well, I wonder how much gas that small percentage of vehicles has saved anyway?"

I'm too lazy to go back to 2001 and calculate gas saved per year for each individual year...though that would be a very interesting graph. I thought I could use a safe 500,000 prius averaging 46mpg (the EPA number) vs the 2009 Corolla that the EPA gives about 31mpg combined. Thus, I'm assuming that all the people who purchased a Prius would have instead have purchased a Corolla if the Prius wasn't available. Clearly that's a false assumption, but for the purpose of comparison I think the Corolla is the vehicle that is usually chosen as a point of comparison. A few people may have gotten a car more FE than the Corolla, many would have gotten something less efficient. I've decided the Corolla is a reasonable and conservative choice here though if someone would like to redo the calculations with a different number I'd take no issue with it.

500k Prii @15k miles/year @ 46MPG = 163,043,478 gallons of gas
burned.

500k Corolla @ 15k mi/yr @ 31MPG = 241,935, 483 gallons gas burned.

So ~78,900,000 of gas saved in one year b/c the Prius was chosen over the Corolla. I think most of us here believe that the acual amount is likely much bigger than that.

I think each of us can pat ourselves on the back for doing out part in reducing the fuel consumption needs of the country.

 

About 30 gallons of gas per barrel of oil:
WikiAnswers - How many gallons of gasoline are made from a 30 gallon barrel of oil

Thus 2,630,000 barrels of gas saved.

 

Now, considering we import 9.6 million barrels of oil PER DAY, clearly we have a hell of a long way to go.

But, I'd like to think that we can start seeing some reduction in consumption due to people choosing other vehicles that are more fuel efficient as well. But that's just a sick number.