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U.S. gas prices 'crash'

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A

alphaNoid

Banned
I have a photo back from when I was 17 working at a gas station, in the background the price for Unleaded (89) was listed at $0.89 a gallon. Mind you the station I worked for was run by a greedy fucker who jacked up prices since he was near the freeway, was the only station in town with propane refills and in an affluent area.

I think back then unleaded in the area was closer to $0.65 a gallon.

Fuck $~3.65 a gallon, fuck it to hell. I traded in all of my cars over the past few years for 4 cyl engine cars. 1 paid off, the other is newer and is financed but I'll be damned if I'm going to get shit gas mileage in 2012 and beyond.
LLShC.gif


edit. When I was 16 and got my license, I remember my dad giving me a $5 bill and that would cover gas for nearly 2 weeks. Bring on alternate fuel cars, and fuck big oil and big oil countries. Eat a dick motherfuckers.
 
A

Ash_69

Member
DBT85 said:
It's £1.30 a litre in the UK right now. Thats about £4.90

That's about $7.90 for a US gallon.

Was at £1.33 a week ago. Hopefully the drop continues.

Conversly of course, my job is only 20 miles away and my car does 35-45 miles to a UK gallon.

So a full tank at £71 does me around 350-400 miles.



And I have public transport I can use to get to work.
Click to expand...

My car only takes premium unleaded which is going for about 1.40 a litre and does 19mpg around town. That purchase was a financial disaster (which I fully appreciated at purchase) but I would kill for US fuel prices. :(
 
T

The Lamp

Member
Arjen said:
I would drag my dick trough rusty nails for gas prices like that,
Click to expand...

I live in Texas. Although we have gas prices around the $3/gallon range, most of us drive bigger cars on bigger roads in a bigger state than a European will see in their lifetime lol.

Basically if you don't have a car here in Texas, unless you live in a really old, crammed urban neighborhood, you have no way of getting around. Walking would take hours.
 
D

dragonballjoseph

Member
I remember when I was a kid, my parents would fill up at the gas station. I would think to myself, "why is the amount of gas going in more than the money they're putting in". It was like, $0.85 around that time.

I also remember in 6th grade, seeing gas go to $1.28 and thinking that it was expensive.

I was a stupid kid...
 
S

speculawyer

Member
alphaNoid said:
I have a photo back from when I was 17 working at a gas station, in the background the price for Unleaded (89) was listed at $0.89 a gallon. Mind you the station I worked for was run by a greedy fucker who jacked up prices since he was near the freeway, was the only station in town with propane refills and in an affluent area.

I think back then unleaded in the area was closer to $0.65 a gallon.

Fuck $~3.65 a gallon, fuck it to hell. I traded in all of my cars over the past few years for 4 cyl engine cars. 1 paid off, the other is newer and is financed but I'll be damned if I'm going to get shit gas mileage in 2012 and beyond.
LLShC.gif


edit. When I was 16 and got my license, I remember my dad giving me a $5 bill and that would cover gas for nearly 2 weeks. Bring on alternate fuel cars, and fuck big oil and big oil countries. Eat a dick motherfuckers.
Click to expand...
I wish it were easy. Despite research and advances on all sorts of different technologies (biofuels, algae fuels, EVs, fuel cell cars, etc.), none of them can yet compete strongly with gasoline/diesel. EVs are getting close though. And the nice thing about electricity is that we can create it from almost anything natural gas, nukes, win, coal, waves, solar, geothermal, etc.

At least they put a 'ceiling' on how high gas prices can go before people switch.
 
C

CryptiK

Member
You guys pay less than 90 cents a litre :O THATS CHEAP! we can pay up to $1.80 a litre here which is almost $7 a gallon if my maths is correct
 
GungHo

GungHo

Single-handedly caused Exxon-Mobil to sue FOX, start World War 3
Valnen said:
I don't care about their margins. If 99 cent gas would force them to sell at a loss, they should just be forced to sell at a loss and deal with that until they can come up with alternate fuel (that's also 99 cents or less).
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I don't think you understood me. The price of gasoline and other products will be adjusted at all times at wholesale to guarantee a minimum 10% margin. The government doesn't have a lever to force gasoline prices down to $0.99/gallon. The only lever the government has is to force gasoline prices up through levied taxes.

Valnen said:
The government shouldn't have to make up the difference, the oil companies should just eat the loss.
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How do you plan to do enforce this? With machine guns? They'll just stop operations and the price will go sky high due to lack of supply. I am not usually fan of supply-side economics, but in extreme cases, such as shortage, it can apply. If you really want to see the energy business move away from fossil fuels, you're going to have to provide an attractive alternative that can guarantee them the same profitability.

Link said:
spec, let's not be obtuse here. While I don't think oil companies have any obligation to operate at cost or anything ridiculous like that, they continually post record profits quarter after quarter, and their CEO's rake in so much cash that they're pretty much continually throwing hundreds of millions into political races to get Republicans elected.
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And the margin is still 10%. Lose math, 10% of $400 billion of investment comes to $40 billion profit. We're talking about something with economies of scale that are comparable to geologic time and the number of stars in the galaxy. I'm not saying it's not a lot of money and that the executives aren't raking in massive amounts of money in comparison to the rest of the world, so don't misunderstand me there. I am saying, however, that when you are talking about record profits you need to consider the record scale at which those profits are being made, because you otherwise do not see the real demon in the details, which is in the distribution of those profits.
 
C

chaostrophy

Member
Razgriz-Specter said:
Population density is a major factor,
Every time a politician brings up something like a subway being built around here(Brimingham, AL)
they get laughed at by everyone. it just doesn't make sense, buses have also cut some routes because people just don't ride them enough.
Click to expand...

Yeah, without proper land use and control of sprawl, transit can't be very effective. Ultimately people need to make a choice about where they live. A lot of people in the US feel entitled to a single-family home, a backyard, a car...but the fact is that fewer and fewer people will be able to afford to run all that stuff. If my city acted that way toward transit I'd get out ASAP.
 
TheContact

TheContact

Member
I've been paying $3.85 for premium the past couple weeks and I thought that was pretty good. I've noticed it going down, I used to pay over $4
 
E

eastmen

Banned
Here in Paramus new jersey i'm seeing gas as low as 3.33. Which is not bad considering after sandy it wnet up to 3.75.

I have a Pontiac torrent (Basicly a equinox ) and i'm getting mixed 17-20mpg. I'm hoping when i'm ready to buy new again in the next 4-5 years I can get something above 30mpg for the same size suv.

I'm hoping they put the volt power train into an suv soon .
 
L

LegendofJoe

Member
Most of the United States was built after the use of cars became widespread. So our choices are to either urbanize even more than we have already (suburbia will have to die) or revolutionize private transportation. If we choose neither economic collapse is in our future.
 
P

PseudoKirby

Banned
speculawyer said:
Why?

That may be a perfect price to ensure massive flooding a century from now.
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Flooding?

Because you have to think realistically for operating costs for oil companies, and taxes they have to pay.

I dont mind paying $25 to fill up my tank, I think that is fair.

but unrealistically I would say 1 cent a gallon, or FREEEEE, but we dont live in a world of magic and rainbows..
 
L

LuchaShaq

Banned
I run a shop/gas station in New England and they jacked up OUR prices this morning to 3.52 regular/3.92 premium. So once you factor in a tiny cut for our less than 1000 gallons a day station you are talking 3.60ish for reg 4.02 for prem.

So glad we got our tanks filled at a dime less per gallon or we would be fucked for a few days.
 
F

fabricated backlash

Member
Kabouter said:
Same, a car would actually be affordable in that scenario, which it definitely isn't with $9/gallon gas. As it stands, I have to rely on unreliable, slow and expensive public transport :/.



It's apparently $7.60 a gallon in Germany for regular right now, so not quite so extreme. Think he might be overestimating the value of the euro, or using UK gallons.
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For reference, it's 8.60$ a gallon in Italy.
 
Forsete

Forsete

Gold Member
Last time I fueled up it was $8.38 per gallon diesel here. :)

Our politicians are completely sick on the head though and should be shot once we have our revolution.
Luckily I get around 45-50mpg out of my car. <3
 
V

Vyroxis

Banned
My daily driver gets about 7 mpg in town. My summer vehicle is about half that. These prices hurt, but I knew that going in. But it makes me miss my old Saturn, 40+ mpg was nice.
 
O

Orayn

Member
Minnesota's down to $3.10 or so, down from about $4.

OriginalThinking said:
For some reason it tickles me that Americans refer to Petroleum as gas, when clearly at the time of purchase it's a liquid. Anyway...........
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It tickles me that you refer to gasoline, a refined form of petroleum AKA crude oil, as "petroleum." Do you call high carbon steel hematite as well? ;)
 
W

weekend_warrior

Banned
I was looking at old gas receipts and was amazed to see in Nov 2008 I was paying 1.99/gal for 91, then
Obama got elected
and a just year later it was over $4.
 
S

speculawyer

Member
So like a month or two ago there were all these stories about the fracking revolution and how the USA would become an oil exporter. Oil cost around $80/barrel at the time. It has now risen to over $90/barrel. Go Figure.
 
S

speculawyer

Member
weekend_warrior said:
I was looking at old gas receipts and was amazed to see in Nov 2008 I was paying 1.99/gal for 91, then
Obama got elected
and a just year later it was over $4.
Click to expand...

Yeah . . . world-wide financial meltdowns are AWESOME! We really should have elected McCain so we could have another world-wide financial meltdown. Maybe even a full blown depression would be even better! We could get gas down to a buck-fifty!
 
Death Dealer

Death Dealer

Member
GoutPatrol said:
I pay 5 bucks US to fill up every couple weeks or so. But then I'm driving a scooter.
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If / once gas goes up to over $5 a gallon, I'll probably get a scooter for commuting.

Right now I commute on a sportbike. The mileage is terrible for a 2 wheeled vehicle. About 30 MPG. I have to put around $15 in the tank about once a week.

But I was thinking last night as I filled it up, gas has seemed pretty cheap lately. I paid $3.29/gal for premium.

I remember what a big deal it was when gas first went above $2.00 in California back around 2000-2001.

Yeah.. I don't drive V-8s any more. My first car was an old corvette. It got about 14 miles per gallon. I'd love to own a classic restored mustang, but don't know if I want to invest in a car that uses that much gas. Who knows ? $5/gal will probably seem cheap eventually.
 
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