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In my opinion, do the math carefully. If you drive 40 miles each way, that's 80 miles per day, 400 miles per week, for 50 weeks per year, that's 20,000 miles. I don't know what you drive, but if you get 15 mpg (my 1998 Chevy K1500 with 350 for instance), you are using 1,333 gallons to commute. At $4/gallon, that's $5,300. If you double that fuel economy (Honda Civic? for instance) you can save $2,650 on commuting in a year. If you go to a Diesel VW Rabbit can you get 45 MPG and save even more, but right now diesel is $.75 higher than gas? Again, I don't know what you drive, so would you trade in what you have and buy something comparable in price, upgrade, add another car to the fleet for commuting, etc, all weighs in the equation. For me, I need the truck a couple of days per week, so I can't trade it in. In Taxachusetts, the registration, insurance, excise tax, etc on a second vehicle will be a minimum of $1,000 per year, so now the potential savings is $1,650. Now look at the purchase price and in Massachusetts again we have sales tax at 5% of the sale price. You have maintenance and upkeep on 2 vehicles, which should not be different from using one vehicle with more mileage, but it could be. I agree, a bolt on improvement to double our economy would be a home run, but I don't think it exists. The whole grease car market is going to change as our government is realizing that there is no highway tax on McDonald's used grease and they will catch up with it, then the supply vs demand will also make free used grease a commodity worth $3/gallon as more people want it. Do the math, it might make sense for you to add a more economical commuter vehicle, but it didn't for me.
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