THE CAR OF THE FUTURE - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 128

a car that gets thirty miles from a gallon of gas. h at's a bit worse than
the average car sold in the United States in 2012. 67 Suppose gasoline
costs four dollars a gallon. Our driver spends about $1,700 every year
on gas for her car. Now imagine she's of ered a similar car that gets forty
miles to the gallon instead. h is would save her (or a future owner)
about i ve thousand dollars over the lifetime of the car . 68
h e broader economy, though, would benei t more than that from
her new purchase. If you use the Oak Ridge numbers, you conclude
that the new car would create extra economywide savings of as much as
forty dollars for every barrel of lower oil consumption, or about a dol-
lar a gallon, because of reduced oil prices, greater economic resilience,
and lower climate damages, none of which the driver would include in
her own calculations. h e extra benei t to society would be more than
a thousand dollars over the life of the car. 69 If the new car gets i t y
miles to the gallon instead, our driver will now save more than eight
thousand dollars, and society might reap another two thousand dollars
in benei ts. If performance were boosted to a hundred miles per gallon,
the driver would save around i t een thousand, with gains to society
approaching four thousand dollars more.
h e most obvious lesson here is that the benei ts to the country
collectively from cut ing oil use are greater than benei ts to individual
car buyers. Just because people won't buy more ei cient cars without
government intervention doesn't mean the more ei cient cars wouldn't
help the overall economy. h e case becomes stronger as the costs of ei -
cient vehicles drop and oil prices rise. Today, the United States benei ts
when consumers shit to slightly more ei cient cars and trucks, leverag-
ing inexpensive improvements in conventional engines. But the country
loses if it pushes too quickly into expensive vehicles, like electric cars,
that provide limited additional fuel savings. In a decade or two, though,
if the price of ultra-ei cient vehicles drops a lot, the case for pushing
people to use them will become stronger.

W hat happens if the United States reduces its oil consumption

not through ei ciency or by shit ing to electricity as a fuel but
by using natural gas to power cars and trucks? It still gets the benei t
of lower world oil prices that result from a reduced demand for oil.