BORRRRINGAH!

     It has been well over a month (6 weeks and 4 days, to be exact) since we began living life as a one car family.  To make my blog worth reading, I would love to tell you that the first month has been fraught with panicked compromises that made us truly FEEL our level of commitment and sacrifice.  So let’s just pretend that is true.  There….do you feel better?

    The truth is that it has been quite ordinary.  Maybe even boring!  I thought going into this experiment that we were the perfect candidates for one car family status.  My wife, Krystal, is a stay at home mom and my children are home schooled, so that eliminates a lot of the potential scheduling conflicts.  We have worked out a schedule where Krystal drops me off at work after lunch a couple of days a week, so the kids can attend music lessons and other educational opportunities.

One of the most exciting developments is that the aforementioned schedule has inspired me to invent a new “politically correct” term for suffering the fate of being stuck at work car-less……Automotively Challenged.  It’s not the greatest, I admit, but it rolls off the tongue much more easily than Vehicularly Challenged.  I have yet to trademark the term, so feel free to use it as opportunities arise.  (I told you it was exciting.  I’ll be available for autographs after the show) 

Besides becoming a term coiner, I have also learned that we rarely test our cars to their full capabilities.  Who would’ve imagined that you could fit three 3 ft. x 6 ft. folding tables into a Toyota Corolla?  Or a 12 ft. x 12 ft. tailgate party tent?  Upcoming challenge…..next week I will attempt to fit $45 in gasoline into the tank at one time.  I know that a lot of people do that on a weekly basis, but it’s never been done in the Corolla. 

Before I bore you by waxing poetic about miles per gallon, I thought the best way to end a boring blog post was to break out the statistics!!!                  

In a study of households with at least one vehicle, Experian Automotive found that households with three or more cars are the single largest group among American car owners.  Their survey also revealed that households with a vehicle have an average of 2.28 vehicles per household.  Two vehicle households made up 31 percent of car-owning households and one vehicle households comprised 34 percent of car-owning households.  There are a lot of cars on the road, yet there are more one car households than I ever imagined.      

    AAA has been publishing annual reports on the cost of owning a vehicle since 1950, when gas was 27 cents per gallon.  In its 2011 report, AAA estimated the annual cost of owning a vehicle by type using gasoline cost of $2.88 per gallon (times have changed!!) in addition to estimated finance costs, depreciation, insurance, tires and maintenance costs.  They estimated that for a 15,000 mile year a small sedan would cost $6,758 to operate and a minivan would cost $9,489 to operate.  If saving $9,500 a year is boring, count me in!!