Fuel Cost Calculator
Calculate the gas cost for a road trip or your annual commute. Compare a gas car, hybrid, and EV side by side.
Trip or annual fuel cost
Annual: gas vs hybrid vs EV
How fuel cost is calculated
Fuel cost equals miles divided by MPG times price per gallon. A 1200 mile trip at 30 MPG and $3.50 per gallon costs $140. Cost per mile: $0.117.
Las Vegas annual commute
The average Las Vegas commuter drives 14000 miles per year. At $3.60 per gallon and 28 MPG that is $1800 per year. A hybrid at 50 MPG costs $1008. A Tesla at 3.5 miles per kWh and Nevada electricity at $0.11 per kWh costs $440 per year.
Gas vs hybrid vs EV
EVs win on fuel cost almost everywhere. A typical EV costs $8000 to $12000 more upfront. At $1000 per year in fuel savings payback takes 8 to 12 years.
How do I convert km/L to MPG?
Multiply km/L by 2.352.
Does speed affect fuel economy?
Yes. Driving 75 mph vs 55 mph reduces economy by 20 to 25 percent.
What MPG does the average US car get?
New cars average 28 to 30 MPG. SUVs: 22 to 25 MPG. Hybrids: 45 to 55 MPG.
What this actually costs you over a year
Fuel is the expense people underestimate most, because it leaves in small amounts. Forty dollars here, sixty there, and none of it feels like a decision. But a Las Vegas commuter driving fourteen thousand miles a year in a car returning twenty-eight miles per gallon, with gas at $3.60, spends about eighteen hundred dollars a year getting to work and back. That is a vacation. It is also roughly what most people budget for car insurance without blinking, and they know their insurance figure by heart.
The same driver in a hybrid returning fifty miles per gallon spends about a thousand. In an electric car managing three and a half miles per kilowatt hour, with Nevada electricity around eleven cents, roughly four hundred and forty. Those three numbers - eighteen hundred, a thousand, four hundred and forty - are the whole argument, and they are worth knowing before a salesperson tells you what they are.
Why the payback math is less flattering than the brochure
Electric cars win on fuel almost everywhere in the United States, and Nevada's cheap electricity makes the gap wider here than in most states. But a comparable electric car still costs somewhere between eight and twelve thousand dollars more to buy. If it saves you a thousand a year in fuel, the purchase takes eight to twelve years to pay for itself, and that is before you account for depreciation, home charger installation, or the fact that most people do not keep a car for twelve years.
This is not an argument against electric cars. There are good reasons to buy one that have nothing to do with arithmetic. It is an argument against buying one because of the arithmetic, and then discovering the arithmetic was never really on your side.
The one habit that changes your fuel bill immediately
Slow down on the interstate. Driving seventy-five miles per hour instead of fifty-five costs you twenty to twenty-five percent of your fuel economy, and on a long Nevada drive that is not a rounding error. Between Las Vegas and Reno you would save meaningfully more by easing off than by any additive, tire pressure trick, or premium fuel upgrade. Petrol turns into speed, and speed is expensive.
Everything else is smaller. Correct tire pressure is worth a few percent. Removing a roof box you are not using is worth a few percent. Air conditioning costs less than people assume, and considerably less than driving through Nevada in July with the windows down.
Converting figures from outside the US
If you have a figure in kilometers per liter and want miles per gallon, multiply by 2.352. Litres per hundred kilometers is the inverse and catches people out: divide 235.2 by the l/100km figure to get MPG. And be careful with imperial gallons - a UK gallon is about twenty percent larger than a US one, so British MPG figures flatter a car that would look worse on this side of the Atlantic.