The gas price jumps will help make the Green Line payback faster

[Rick Murphy (RicksVue)]

I've been keeping detailed gas mileage records on my old 2003 VUE and my 2007 VUE Green Line since March of 2005. This lets me directly compare the cost of operating the two vehicles.

For the 2003 (AWD V6), I recorded 21.361 MPG over 20,529 miles at a cost of 0.12 per mile (for fuel only).
For the 2007 Hybrid, I've received 26.330 MPG over 16,858 miles at a cost of 0.11 per mile.

Gee, you might say, only 1 cent per mile? Big deal. Well, it's not quite that easy. That 11c per mile is mostly due to recent gas cost increases; early on I was closer to 9c per mile. (That's because the average fuel cost for the V6 was $2.51 per gallon while it's $2.84 on the Green Line and going up rapidly.)

Working it another way, the Green Line used 640 gallons of gas that has cost me $1,862.04 over it's lifetime, where the V6 would have used 789 gallons of gas for the same distance. At the same average per-gallon price, that would have cost $2247.63: a savings of $385 so far. That gap is going to go up rapidly as gas prices rise. If prices get up to $5.00 a gallon I'd be able to recover the cost of the hybrid purely on fuel alone (ignoring the environmental advantages of the GL.)

Saving $385 isn't peanuts. That's almost enough to pay for 10 gallons of gas! :-)

[Ray]

Hi Mark, That's cool to hear about the mpg on your Vue. I'm a writer for Saturn 360 magazine, and would like to chat with you a bit more about your fuel economy. Can you drop me a note and I'll get back with you. I'm at: [e-mail] Thanks Rick!