tell me about it - hypermiling, that is!

Hey there lead foot! The next time you're playing nascar on the beltway and have an itch to lay the horn on a hokey-pokey snail doin a hokey-pokey 55 in the charge lane, don't! He might be getting 70 miles to the gallon (and grinning all the way to the bank).

This excerpt (from article and chat linked above) comes to you from washingtonpost.com, where staff writer Josh Zumbrun just replaced Carolyn Hax as my favorite writer of columns dispensing semi-useful advice with humor (and much eye-rolling, but I can neither confirm nor deny those allegations.)

Fairfax, Va. : I have one year of college left, and plan to get a car after I graduate. If I spend the money for a hybrid car, would I save enough money in the long run to make it worthwhile? My number one concern is the environment, but also as a poor college student, I have to be careful with the money. Any other suggestions for college students making their first car purchase would be great!

Josh Zumbrun: Alright, it's math time!
Check this out: I drive about 500 miles a week or about 25,000 miles a year. Now, let's assume that for the last year we've had an average of $3 per gallon gas.

At 75 miles per gallon, the best I can get, that's 333 gallons of gas this year. At $3 per gallon, that's $1,000.

At 60 miles per gallon, which you can easily get with a hybrid and a few of these techniques, 420 gallons of gas or $1,250.

At 40 miles per gallon, what you could possibly get in a typical sedan, 625 gallons of gas, $1,875.
But once you start talking about the way most people drive, it adds up faster.

At 25 miles per gallon, 1000 gallons of gas, $3,000.

At 20 miles per gallon, you'll end up paying $3,750.

If I were at 10 miles per gallon in my squirrel-squashing, deer-smacking Canyonero SUV (hahaha!!) -- $7,500 a year in gas. And some drivers get even worse mileage than that.

So it depends how much you drive, mostly. And how much you've got to spend. Nothing is going to be cheaper than that 1988 grey Ford Escort you inherit from your great-grandma.