Gasoline price decreasing- interest in hybrids

It's down about 20 cents a gallon here from the peak.

I'm sure you're at least partially right about interest. Both the American Public and Detroit have very short attention spans, and very little incentive to plan ahead.

After one warning in the 70's and another now, we can only hope that more people will get the message, and I suspect some will, but if gas prices go back down significantly in the short term, you can expect people to go back to their old habits.

If you ARE in the market for a Truck or SUV, right now would be the time to buy one while the dealers are still feeling pinched, and the incentives are HUGE, hehe.

 

My only observation would be that if gas prices go down at all, it will be for the short term; not the long term.

 

I expect gas prices to take a dip then head back up. Think China - China China!

 

Our stations (Mobil an almost guaranteed exception) are hanging just under $2/gallon this week. Was 5 to 8 cents higher the past couple of weeks

 

What's really most disturbing is that this is extremely typical nationwide with gas stations - jump prices up 20 or 30 cents, then down 5 or 10 cents and people stop complaining. Our "Low" prices around here are what, $1.83? That's still way too much to pay in my book. But now the public can buy Professional grade SUV's!! Thank god! I'm sure the wait will be just as long for Hummer's new XUV when it comes out as it is for the Prius.

Oh, and the 4th of July is coming up. Who's up for betting that gas prices will skyrocket again around Tuesday-Thursday just in time for the holiday, then drop a few cents and make most people go "well, at least they're down!".

Sorry about the rant, sometimes this country makes me bitter.

-m.

 

and think "India, India"

 

People are sheeple....uh wait how about frogs....frople?

Perhaps this is just urban legend but....

If you drop a frog in boiling water it'll jump out. If you drop it in temperate water and turn the heat on that same frog will sit there until it boils to death.

 

I heard a piece that compared the Saudis to Drug dealers carefully manipulating the price of oil to keep their markets "hooked". They don't want us to pursue alternatives to oil other than using oil to make hydrogen, that would be OK. Sounds like Bush's hydrogen plan. They want us to continue to buy gas guzzlers of any kind and they don't like the interest in hybrids as a bridge to much reduced oil use. I hate to say it but a tax on carbon with money spent on research would be ideal. Start it low and increase it yearly on a progressive basis to nudge the economy away from burning fossil fuels. At some point we need to find a way to recapture the carbon we have released and put in back in the ground! Oh well time to get down off the soap box. I do feel better now.

 

The Drug Dealer Comparison came from a NPR interview.

 

And add India - India India

Then think "Hubbert's Peak" and realize that while our appetite for petroleum is growing 3-5% per year, India and China are growing at close to 10% per year, and that is expected to ACCLERATE. And once we hit "Hubbert's Peak" (also know in the oil industry as "The Big Rollover", prodcution peaks and declines from there. There may be a few blips up, but the trend will be down at a time when consumption is GROWING. So, gas prices will be going up and up and up sooner or later, and, I am afraid, even driving a 60 mpg Prius won't make driving cheap enough to think about.

 

And remember that every barrel of oil we buy sends money to the Saudi backed terrorists. At a recent forum at LA Central Library, S. David Freemen (former head of LADWP, former director of energy for the State of California) simply said that every gallon of gas we buy supports terror and that we MUST get out of the oil "addiction" if we want to change that.

Soapboxes are what is needed right now, because there are too many of us who are OBLIVIOUS to what is going on and what we face. Geez, we all would rather simply tank up and cruise on over to the mall, but we need to wake up and realize that life style is NOT sustainable - not for 500 million Westerners, much less for the 4 billion elsewhere in the world who want the same thing.

 

Not exactly, but a better way to think of oil is that there are a bunch of producers that dump their oil into a big pool. Then there are a bunch of consumers (Us being the biggest, but others like Europe, Japan, China, India, ... you get the idea) that suck it out of that pool. So our insatiable demand will still ultimately effect price. It has been recently reported that there is little if any excess capacity in OPEC to pump oil. So they are not really holding out on us. The greater effect is our thirst.

 

Gas prices are going nowhere but up, with inevitable fluctuations related to seasons and circumstances.

But hybrids are here to stay. If gas was free the Prius would still be the best car in its price class.

Until they come up with a battery that can hold the same amount of energy for the same weight and volume as a tankful of gas.

 

Gas in the USA

Gas at $2 a galllon in the US is a bargain no matter what, and I'm tired of people complaining about it. As you all know, adjusted for inflation it's nowhere near as high as it was in the early 1980s. But that's not all. Real income in the US is almost twice what it was in the 1950s. When that is factored in, gasoline today is less than half of what it cost in the 1950s.

More than that, the percentage of income that Americans spend on energy of all kinds has decreased to an all time low.

Go to Europe — they pay $5-6 a gallon there, and seem to manage with smaller, more fuel efficient cars. Maybe if we paid that much we'd be on the road to becoming a more envinomentally friendly nation.

 

I agree with ReallyFrustrated. All of the low mpg cars on the road are evidence of gas prices being relatively low in my opinion and I think they will continue to be low in the short term. Even with the rise that we've recently experienced, I witnessed very little change in peoples behavior. Even people I know on very tight budgets continued to drive in their typical fashion, i.e. no carpooling, no consolidation of errand driving, or god forbid, walking, just lots of complaining.

 

For fundamental reasons this is highly unlikely. A battery needs to maintain an internal structure (plates with reactive surfaces, electrolyte, et cetera) that supports energy storage. In contrast, in a liquid hydrocarbon the internal structure (that is, the chemical bonds within the molecules of fuel) *is* the energy storage; the only other structure required is a tank to hold it. This is manifest in the relatively dismal energy density of even advanced batteries like those in our Prii. The gas tank is roughly the same size as the battery pack, but a full tank weighs about half as much and holds enough energy to move the car about one hundred times as far as does the battery.