Quote:
Originally Posted by blackxpress  I'll bet the ones you get stuck behind in traffic are not TDI diesels. I had a 99 VW Jetta TDI (wish I had it back). It got 50 mpg, ran really strong and the only time it ever smelled was when you first started it up on a cold winter morning. Once it got warmed up it didn't smell any worse than a gasoline powered car. But we digress.
No one disagrees that fuel prices are a lot higher in Europe than they are in the US. It's been that way for years. I would bet if IrishGolfer is commuting 600 miles per week, IrishGolfer is driving a whole lot more than the average Irish driver. The point is, on average, Americans drive a lot more miles than Europeans by necessity. This is a huge country and most of us are not served by adequate public transportation. We can't walk to the store or ride a bicycle to work. The distances are too great. Unless we live in a major city like NYC we can't take the subway or ride the bus. Even our relatively low fuel costs compared to European prices are still a major burden to us at $4.00 per gallon. We have to drive.
I was in Korea 12 years ago and their fuel costs were high even then. The difference was that their country is small and they have an excellent public transportation system. If I lived there I wouldn't even own a car. You can go from city to city on the bullet train and, once there, the bus will take you anywhere you need to go. If gas gets too expensive for the Koreans to afford it, they have a simple solution. DON'T DRIVE! We Americans, on the other hand, do not have that option. |
While I agree with 100% of your points, the fact that we (yes, Canada too) have spoiled ourselves by not paying attention to such rises in costs when it comes to the distances that are needed to cover to get from point A to point B. It's nice to live in a suburb with a nice big lawn and a huge yard, but it's not necessary.
If it's a huge aspect of your life that you can't live without, then you have no right to complain about your need for fuel, no matter what the costs are.
It's tough to have your cake and eat it too, because we've been gorging ourselves on vast quantities of cake for years without thinking of the repercussions.
Again, all we can do is point a finger in the mirror.
R35