Let me get this straight: You’re going to drive 10-20 miles, spend time crossing the border, fill up in Mexico to save a dollar or so per gallon on gas, then spend time crossing back into the US and driving back home? You’re a fucking idiot!
Is this really the best use of your time? Do you realize you’re using extra gas to get into Mexico and back to the US? How about the time idling while you’re waiting to cross the border?
Take the money you’ve ‘saved’ and buy a life.
Dude, it’s not the money, it’s the principle of the thing–it’s important to feel like you’re one up on The Man.
The guy interviewed on NPR had a truck that held well over 100 gallons - Modified Ford F250, I think.
He saved $200 a tank.
He’d be a fool not to.
But let’s say you’ve got a 18 gallon tank like mine and get the same 24 mpg I get.
That’s 2 gallons spent (~$4 @ mexican prices) to fill a tank for maybe $30 instead of $60. I’m $26 ahead. Over the course of a month, I’ve got an extra $75 in my wallet (or so).
If the time to get across the border isn’t an issue for the buyer - why not do it?
ETA: Ah NPR Report…
Average $2.53 per gallon for gasoline in Mexico. The driver (for a trucking company) referenced above drives a Ford F250 truck that holds 190 gallons of diesel that costs $4.65 per gallon in El Paso but only $2.20 in Mexico. He describes the hassle but says it’s worth it.
My parents live in Fernandina Beach, FL. Gas is a lot cheaper in Georgia. They do go out of their way and plan and such to not have to fill up in Florida. Why not? Of course, usually they’re passing Georgia anyway.
There was a $2 gas promotion in Norman a few weeks ago, done by a local realtor. The idiots wrapped around the strip mall, down the street, and supposedly onto a highway off ramp, screwing up traffic. The city had to send cops (on duty) to direct traffic/control the crowd. A news chopper showed up, burning quite a bit of fuel, I would guess. Some morons lined up 6 hours in advance and some people wound up waiting even longer than that. Some complete morons left their AC on while waiting. This was on a Friday, when you’d imagine people would be working. The best part of all: there was an 8 gallon maximum. Way to save 15 bucks, dipshit!
At $200 a tank, even if it takes him four hours to make the round trip, he’s effectively earning $50 an hour. Taking that sort of money is pretty far from idiocy.
^ This is what I don’t understand. They do these radio promos all the time around here, and they baffle me: Drive 25 miles, wait 3 hours in the sun, frustration and craziness of being in a competative mob scene, and you save, say, 30 bucks tops.
I would pay someone $30 to avoid having to do that.
It’s mass hysteria, I’m convinced.
I’ve got a tiny (10 gallon - really holds 11, if I’m down to fumes) tank. I get 30 miles to the gallon on average. How do I figure out how much of a savings is worth driving how far? Assume my time is free, and I’m not losing money by taking off work to drive further. I feel like my algebra refresher course should be giving me the math knowledge to solve this, but I’m not sure how to set it up. Help?
(Not a homework question, I swear. But a good example for my kids of “why we need to learn this stuff.” I love real world word problems.)
I wonder how many of these people have actually figured out the cost of going out of their way to fill up in Mexico. Gas cost per unit driving distance, wait and idle time at the border, extra depreciation on the car, etc, etc.
EDIT: wasn’t there a thread recently where we were figuring out the cost of driving versus taking the bus? It had these kind of calculations.
EDIT: Here it is.
Nearly everyone, in some way, trades time for money. We all have our price.
My time is worth a helluva lot more than $10/hour. I’m sure yours is also. My son and daughter, however, have more time than money. It might make it worthwhile to them.
Take the difference between what you would’ve paid for gas without searching and what you did pay after searching. Divide by the number of hours you spent searching. That’s your effective hourly wage for searching for cheap gas.
Yeah, but it’s not really the searching I’m concerned with. It’s more like: If I have to drive X miles to save Y dollars, is Y more or less than the amount of gas I’ve used to drive X? Is there a way to figure that out so that if I hear about gas Z cents cheaper per gallon X miles away, I should grab my car keys? It seems like there should be some ratio of X:Z that’s more or less constant.
Not such a big problem in south Florida. We’re stuck with our gas prices.
10x = y/30 * z
where y is the number of miles you have to drive, and z is the cost of gas you end up paying, and x is the savings. You’ll have to know y and z beforehand to calculate x, then solve for x.
Woo! Thanks!
There was a Shell station in SF that was going out of business a few months ago- the independent owner was getting screwed by the corporation. So, he lowered his price by like 50%- and people drove in from all over the Bay Area to wait up to three hours- one guy qouted just wanted to brag about how little he paid for a gallon of gas.
Years back, Illinois had one of those gas tax holidays. The day before it was reinstated people lined up at gas stations for as long as 45 minutes. Not all, or even most, were full fillups, just a few gallons to top off their tanks. All of that to save about fifteen cents per gallon.
Hmm. “30” would be your fuel efficiency, in miles per gallon? What’s the 10 again?
10 is how many gallons she’s filling up at the cheaper cost.