Why Skyrocketing Gas Prices Make Motorcycles a No-Brainer

Forget gas, take your bike. to the Throttle and Roast podcast. I'm your host, Niels Meersschaert. In today's episode, I'll be looking at the rapidly rising fuel prices due to the Iran war. I'll look at what's happening with oil prices, the downstream gasoline price increases that are affecting how we use our bikes, using both national averages and local data that I've tracked for more than a decade. And finally, I'll look at fuel economy of cars, trucks, and bikes to see if maybe these higher prices might push us to use motorcycles instead of cars. Now, I do want to say that in this episode, I'm really going to focus on premium gas and the prices that are in for premium because the vast majority of motorcycles require premium fuel. Most of our motorcycles have high compression and therefore require the premium fuel in order to avoid knocks that you would otherwise. So the prices may seem higher than if you're comparing this to regular gas prices, but I'm going to try to keep as much as possible in apples to apples comparison. Now, the war in the Middle East raising oil prices globally. Now, gasoline, of course, is a refined version of oil and gas prices typically do trail oil prices. But if we look at oil prices here in the U. S., west Texas intermediate, which is a common type of oil that is produced here, is now selling for about $99 per barrel. A year ago, it was $59 a barrel. That's a 67% increase in just one year. Now, of course, there was recently a bit of a ceasefire that was at least temporarily started. And this did cause oil prices to drop a little bit. But if we think of where the pricing was just prior to when the ceasefire had been announced, We hit as high as $113 per barrel or a 91% increase from a year ago. These are insanely fast, rapidly rising prices, no matter how or which specific numbers you're comparing. Now, I'll share a link to research that I've done for this, so you can see that in the show notes. And then this way you can look at whenever you're listening to this specific episode of what the current prices are. Now, the other one that I want to look at is the AAA. This is the American Automobile Association. They do a great job of sharing some fuel prices and other data points that are useful to motorists. And they currently tell us that the national average in the United States for premium fuel is $5. 04 per gallon. Now, one year ago is $4. 06, meaning it was nearly a dollar less a year ago for a gallon of gas. Essentially, this means gas prices have climbed 24% over the past year. This is trailing from oil prices, though, so don't expect that the price you see at the pump today is the price you're going to see in a few weeks' time or even a couple months' time because they do tend to trail it. Now, I'll also share a link in the show notes to these AAA numbers so you can see what is going Now, I did want to talk a little bit about some of the personal data that I have. I have been using a tool called Fuelly to track every single tank of gas on all of my motorcycles and all of my cars over the past 15 years. I have a ton of data to look at. Now, this is data that is capturing every amount that I paid, how much fuel I put in. So I'm getting fuel economy numbers, I'm getting average fuel price numbers, everything across the board. But I do want to make one

even though I have data going back to 2011, I'm only going to be looking at data for this episode from 2016 to 2026 over basically a decade of data. And the reason for that is that prior to that time, I actually lived in New York City New York City tends to have higher gas prices than other parts even of New York State, and as a result, I wouldn't want to have those numbers just overwhelm and make the other numbers not be comparable. a lot of the time I'm traveling, I might be refueling anywhere, and so the prices are going to have some volatility. But in general, what I tend to do is I refill the tank as I come home at the same station that's right by my house. So, a lot of the times, a lot of the tanks are filled up at that one station, so this does give us kind of a bit of a history of looking at how the prices there ranged over time. Now, remember, this is just what my local place is charging. This does not mean that these prices are reflective of what you may have in your local jurisdiction, But it does give us a relative change over time that we can use for comparative purposes. So if we look over the past decade, the lowest price per gallon that I paid over the past decade was actually in 2016 and this was at$3. 05/gallon. that's about $2 a gallon less than the national average today, so it was a significantly lower fuel price back then. worst of the pandemic, when the entire world was shut down, was in 2020. I still was riding, albeit not necessarily as often, perhaps, as maybe I would have done in a normal year. And a lot of other people weren't driving or riding as much either. And this helped to keep prices down. It still was not as low as in 2016. The prices were down to about $3. 12 a gallon on average. But this was still a nice reduction from the year prior, where it was an average of about $3. 50 a gallon in 2019. Now the worst year for fuel prices over the past decade was 2022. This was when the economy was really starting to open up. All of that latent demand was really starting to pop up for everything. And we definitely saw this in energy prices as well. average price per gallon that I paid in 2022 was $5. 16 per gallon. Or more than $2 higher than I had paid in 2016. Now, as I look at this, and I actually went to the gas station just yesterday just to check the numbers before I recorded, my local station is currently charging $5. 29 per gallon, which is even higher than the worst time of the pandemic. Now, if we take a simple thing of saying, hey, well, what was my average price per gallon paid each year over the past ten years? Take the average of those, I come out with about $4. 31. That was the average price per gallon that I paid over the past decade. So we are definitely about a dollar more than I've paid on average over the preceding decade as the current prices today. So it is a really, really significant price increase that we're experiencing.

Now, I do want to look at from a few different angles, because I think while the prices themselves is an interesting part of the story, I don't think it tells us the of what we should be considering, because there's also the economy of whatever vehicle you're traveling in. The price per gallon is just a very easy thing, we're driving along the road, we see this price, and it's something that just psychologically has an impact onto us. But we oftentimes don't do the math to figure out well, what does this actually mean of how much it costs me to travel a given distance. and this is where economy really comes into the table. Now, according to the Energy Department here in the US, a typical car will get about 24.4 miles per gallon. We do love trucks here in the US though, and it's a very popular vehicle. I think the Ford F-150 had been the top selling vehicle for what, 40 years or 50 years at this point, it's something ridiculous. We do love trucks and the average light truck only gets about 17.8 miles per gallon. Meanwhile, the average motorcycle according to the Energy Department gets 44 miles per gallon. So a huge difference between a truck at 17.8 miles per gallon and a motorcycle at 44 miles per gallon. Now, if we take these and now we start to say, "Okay, well, what does it cost you per mile?" Well, if we look at the numbers and we say,"Hey, let's use that energy department 24.4 and the average fuel prices that are going on right now according to AAA," we're going to find out that cars will spend about 20 cents per mile at today's prices versus about 17 cents a mile a year ago. It's a decent change in terms of the increase in cost to travel as you would have done a year ago. Now, trucks are even worse. They're averaging 28 cents a mile is what it's going to cost to move those vehicles around versus about 23 cents a mile one year ago. Now, motorcycles on the other hand are 11 cents a mile today versus about 9 cents mile a year ago. Now, of course I'm basing all of these numbers on premium gas. There are some cars and trucks, fewer motorcycles, but there are more cars and trucks which can use regular gas. If you have a typical, you know, very common today four-cylinder turbocharged engine, of course you're still going to probably need to use premium gas. But there are some especially in trucks, where you can get by with regular gas. So if you look at the regular gas prices, according to AAA, they're reporting the current regular average is $4. 16.6 a gallon versus $3. 23.5 a year ago. So a car using regular gas today is going to average about 17 cents a mile while a truck will average about 23 cents a mile. So when we compare that to the 11 cents a mile for a motorcycle, the motorcycle is still coming out ahead. It's still going to be significantly cheaper even if you're premium fuel versus regular fuel. So the economy is always part of the equation. Now, the common thinking is that as gas prices rise, people will travel far less, especially for leisure purposes. And if we're kind of honest about it, here in the United States, we tend to use motorcycles more for leisure riding than for, let's say, commuting. And so there is a natural inclination to believe that we are going to ride our motorcycles less often because of that expense. Now, for me, I kind of think of this a little bit differently. I don't think it would necessarily change my desire to do a leisure trip, but it will more dictate which vehicle I use. So while I might have said, hey, you know what, I'll take the car. I'll just go for a fun drive. I'm more likely to say, you know what, I'll take the bike because it's going to be a little bit more cost effective. So the more trips that I can replace with a car at 20 cents a mile versus a motorcycle at 11 cents a mile. It's just going to be better. It's going to be cheaper and it's going to be a lot more fun anyway. Now, my current car actually uses regular gas. So it's going to be about 17 cents a mile versus the 11 cents a mile on a motorcycle. So it's not as big of a difference, but it still does lean in favor of taking the bike versus the car. You know, I can actually do something which may seem a little weird compared to a lot of other motorcyclists. Some motorcyclists will say, oh, you motorcycle is only a big bike. It's got to have, you know, a huge V twin, you know, 1800 CC. And that's the impression of what a motorcycle is, or it has to be a very high powered sport bike. Well, I've had bikes of every kind of variance. I have cruisers. I've had adventure bikes. I've had sport bikes. I've had classic bikes. I love all motorcycles. And one of the bikes that I actually use quite a lot is I actually do have a scooter. We had two cars at one point. I got rid of my second car and replaced it with a scooter. And the reason is that for my purposes, it was like, I'm just going and running an errand on my own, or I was just running to the train station to go into work in the city. It made more sense for me to take a scooter and take advantage of that. And the scooter actually can carry a lot of stuff on it. I've actually carried two by fours on the scooter from the hardware store. So I tend to use my Vespa for doing a lot of local errands going into town. So on average, most of my trips are, let's say, less than 10 miles average round trip. So it's not a lot of long distance trips, but a lot of short trips in the areas where, let's say in a car where that average fuel economy that we looked at is probably just your overall mixed average. These are a lot of short trips where the mileage tends to be even worse. Now my Vespa, over all of the trips that I've done, which as I said, the vast majority tends to be these small trips, I've averaged about 68 miles per gallon with that scooter. Now it does use premium gas. And as I said, my local premium gas right now is$5. 29 a gallon. So I would only pay about 8 cents a mile for riding my scooter around. So I'll simply double down on using the scooter for all of my local trips. Whenever possible, instead of having to use the I pay less than half per mile for the scooter as I would if I took the car. It's a huge cost savings for me to take the scooter. And quite frankly, it's just more fun. Now the scooter is not the most fun bike under the sun. I'll be completely honest with it. But if I'm just running an errand. Yeah, that's fine. I can carry so much stuff on there. I go food shopping with the thing. It's, it's great. I think more people should actually give scooters a serious consideration. In fact, just like I did to replace a second car, because you can do a lot with a scooter. It's a really cool vehicle. Now, longer trips will still push me probably towards one of my other bikes, but I'll still save even there quite a bit versus what I would do if I was to take that trip in a car. So let's wrap up. We looked at the rapidly rising oil prices, which are up more than 65% versus a year ago. We also looked at the national averages of fuel prices, which are nearly a dollar a gallon more than they were just one year ago. And finally, we looked at fuel economy combined with the fuel prices and we saw that cars are about twice the price per mile as a motorcycle, while trucks are almost three times the cost per mile. So my question for you is given that, are the higher gas prices going to slow down your riding or are they going to make you ride more often than using your car? Are you going to commute more often using a motorcycle instead of a car? Share your thoughts to the text to show link in the show notes or leave a voicemail at throttle and roast dot com slash voicemail. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you next week.