A brief post here, to highlight an important topic and to direct attention to a great resource for all you Car Data Nerds out there (if you haven’t found it already).
The topic: it seems the USA is finally, finally, starting to reduce its demand for go juice. Dinosaur sauce. Bang water. Okay, okay, gasoline. Petrol. We’ve known US consumption of the stuff has been flat for a while, and maybe declining, but with noise in the data from The Great Recession and The Pandemic, it’s only recently that we think we can see a trend clearly emerging. And it is… down. Here’s the important chart:
The important source is The Energy Institute at Haas, which you should be reading and which is often overlooked. The source for this specific chart is here and provides much more detail.
We all know the Usual Suspects for the source of this trend: increasing numbers of BEVs on the road (some impact), increasing numbers of HEV and PHEV hybrids on the road (bigger impact), and improving fuel economy for Plain Ol’ ICE vehicles (big impact). (Remember, gasoline consumption is driven by stocks of cars, not annual sales of cars.)
Inevitably politics enters the ring here, and we’ve all heard all the arguments already, so please don’t send me screeds about whether EV subsidies are too high or too low, or whether actually ICE and Big Oil are actually the real subsidy winners, or whether BEV energy savings come at an unacceptable cost of exploited labor in Africa, or anything at all about the views of That Man – or in this case, Those Two Men1. When it comes to electric vehicles, everything you have heard, both pro and con…. is true.
Putting that all aside (admittedly a heavy lift) the net outcome should be welcomed by both ends of the political spectrum (if such as thing still existed, as opposed to the rugby scrum we have now): the left from an environmental perspective, and the right from a national security perspective (less dependence on foreign sources, if not now then at some future point).
And of course, less transportation usage of gasoline frees supplies up for recreational use.
