What is expensive is the cultural belief that 30 miles is a fairly normal distance to go every day to get to work. What is expensive is a society that sends products back and forth thousands of miles during their production and distribution. What is expensive is living in the countryside or a suburb in a place with no local shops or community.
What is expensive is having cars twice the size of what’s actually needed. (I blame the early adopters of SUVs in the 1990s for this one, since everyone else has been playing catchup since then. However, you only feel safer in higher cars. I looked through all the studies once and they show that there is little to no overall safety benefit of being in an SUV or pickup – the reason is that that rollover risk is higher and this mostly cancels out the other advantages in terms of injury and death rate.)
Cars are expensive. When you’ve paid a thousand per year for your insurance, another thousand for maintenance, repairs and servicing, and maybe a couple of thousand per year in depreciation, and already another couple of thousand on petrol/gasoline, any increase is going to hurt. What is expensive is owning a car. What is less expensive is not owning a car. What we need is better city planning, more safe cycling, more working from home, improved public transport, and other things so that the societal norm becomes one car per family and zero cars per single person with no children.
Petrol itself is NOT expensive. If you don’t believe me, consider this: petrol costs a similar amount to coca cola, orange juice, or bottled water. Anything is expensive if you consume huge amounts of it. 5 litres of petrol a day is typical for a car driver. If you guzzled down 5 litres a day of orange juice you’d be a lot more concerned about the price of orange juice that you probably are right now.
To get petrol, they have to survey for oil, negotiate with governments and landowners, dig oil out of the ground (sometimes sideways), build refineries, pipelines, transport things thousands of miles, pay off governments so they won’t try to fix climate change, and probably a lot else besides, and at the end of all that the price of it is similar to bottled water. That’s a miracle. And people are still complaining? You think petrol should be cheaper than water?
We only think it’s expensive because we are used to what it cost before, and that is our reference point.
Also, did you know that petrol engines are about 20%-25% efficient? That means when you pay £1.50 for petrol, about £0.33 of that is moving your car down the road, and about £1.17 is wasted as heat. As I said, petrol is NOT expensive. Cars are useless. (Diesel cars are a bit better on efficiency, but not much. Electric cars are far better.)
Imagine if you bought 5 glasses of orange juice for £1 each, knocked the first two on the floor, lost the third one, and spilled the fourth one down your shirt, and finally managed to drink the last one. Then you went around telling everyone how annoying it was to have to pay £5 for a drink of orange juice. Unfortunately, when you buy 5 litres of petrol, 3-4 of them will basically be wasted, and there’s nothing you can do about it as they can’t and won’t ever make petrol engines efficient.
So if you want to save money on petrol buy less of it. Go car free, go electric, buy a smaller car, live closer to your work or work from home. And if none of those options are realistically available because of the society and culture you’ve been brought up in, then vote, campaign, send an email to your MP asking for EV subsidies, cheaper train tickets and safer cycle lines. Or ask your boss to allow more days working from home etc.
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