Environmentalism

Instead of the policy focus on getting people into hybrids to improve the miles per gallon gap, a much more efficient way to reduce overall emissions would be to focus on the extreme fuel guzzlers and getting them to switch to more moderate fuel guzzlers.

This is a hard concept for us to get our brains around. Richard B. Larrick and Jack B. Soll, reporting in Science (gated) found that only 1 percent of college students studied correctly perceived that an improvement from 14 to 24 m.p.g. saves considerably more fuel than an improvement from 24 to 46.

To give our brains a break, we might adopt a better way to look at fuel efficiency, aided by the manipulation of a mathematical tool in use in the Indus Valley almost 5,000 years ago — the unglamorous fraction.

The trick is one that even fourth-graders can master: invert the fraction. Let’s consider not miles per gallon but gallons per mile (or, to make the numbers prettier, gallons per hundred miles). By this metric, we get an unclouded picture: the Prius uses 2.17 gallons per hundred miles, the RAV4 uses 4.17, and the Range Rover uses 7.14.

But who are we kidding on some level. Cars are, and always will be, a vanity good. The reason people buy Prius' is because what they think it says about them. Likewise about Range Rovers. People do not buy cars to improve the environment or lower their impact on the environment. They buy cars like they buy anything else - a cost/benefit analysis. Will this get me laid vs. can I afford it vs. will it do the job of transporting me of where I need to go.