7-years of my driving as a chart

Tweet

Early in the last decade, my life became blessed by that truly life-changing experience: a bitter and costly divorce. To survive, I tracked every penny as I worked to take care of my family.

Part of my penny-pinching strategies involved obsessively recording my gas receipts. I did this because some of my job includes tracking trends and data analysis. Since my Hyundai Tiburon crossed the 100,000-mile warranty mark, I wanted to catch and prepare for any upcoming mechanical failures.

Also, and truth is, I'm a math geek. There. I admitted it. Feel better?

I would record each ticket into a spreadsheet: the cost per gallon, my miles driven since last fill up, the amount of the gas purchase. The spreadsheet would then calculate the cost per mile, my miles per gallon, and trend lines about the data.

So now, after retiring my faithful Tiburon at 325,000 miles, I have almost 8 years of recordings. Today, I had one last look at the data I've collected. It's interesting because of the historical reporting of gas prices in my neck of the woods.

For some silly reason I thought I would share this with you. Perhaps I can do some good for anyone with insomnia. You can click on the charts for a bigger, better view. Oh joy!


The miles per gallon chart shows the average for each month. This is all of the miles driven for that month divided by the total gallons I put into the car.

One of the first troublesome trends the chart told me about was when my miles per gallon dropped dramatically as you can see. Turned out that my car's speed sensor was acting erratic. I didn't have to replace it immediately because I was testing various GPS systems for my company and relied on the speed reported by those units. This bought me a few months to put money together for the repair that October 2006.


This lengthy chart shows my cost per mile and the average price per gallon for each month. You can see on we had that ridiculous gas price bubble in 2007. And you can see how prices change seasonally.

And being the geek that I am I like to try and find correlations between groups of numbers. In this graph I'm comparing my cost per mile to my cost per gallon. That slope of the trend line in the midst of all those points gives you an approximate idea of my miles per gallon.







And so, there you have it - I drove a car a lot miles, put gas in it, and lived to tell about it.  Are you still awake?