but i drive a honda
Gas is outrageous, today I filled up and it was over $70! I couldn’t believe it.
I did a quick cell phone calculation of my mileage, and I’m getting about 18.5 miles/gallon. Seems a little low, but considering the way I drive, is probably correct. So it got me thinking, how much am I spending a month on gas? According to google, I drive 18.4 miles a day to and from work. I’ll average that out to 20; sometimes I’ll go to target after work or out to lunch. On the weekends I have no idea how much I drive, sometimes I’m all over the place, other times I’m all over the couch, so I’ll just keep it constant and say I drive 140 miles a week…150 to make the math easier 
At 150 miles a week and 4 weeks a month, it comes to 600 miles. Take my average of 20 miles/gallon if I ease off a bit and we get 30 gallons a month (I fill up my 15.something gallon tank about once every two weeks, so these numbers seem correct.)
Ok, lets get the allmighty dollar involved here. I just paid $4.50/gallon, so that comes out to ….$135/month. That is actually less then I was thinking, but I’ll go on with my analysis…what if I start driving a motorcycle that gets 40 miles/gallon?
It’s pretty easy to see that that will cut my bill in half (600miles/40miles/gallon = 15gallons). Now I would be paying $67.5/month. What I was really hoping to do here was prove to myself that buying a motorcycle would save me lots of money. Turns out it will save a lot of money in gas, but it will still take me 60 months to recover that initial cost. Yikes!
But what about maintenance you say? Well, I don’t have any numbers for that, so I’m going to do what I do best. Ignore it, much like I do the check engine light that is always on. Besides, the benefit from that is probably outweighed by the fact that I won’t drive the motorcycle to work every day.
The fact of the matter is, I don’t really want a motorcycle for the gas savings, I want it because my car is boring to drive. Ideally, I’d probably just get a fun to drive car, but lets just say the math on that would put me deep in the red. At least the motorcycles are reasonably priced!