A little belt-tightening could really help Americans save on gas.
Americans are spending more money on fuel these days in part because adult men and women on average are at least 24 pounds heavier than their counterparts were in 1960, a new study has found.
Collectively, today’s automobiles are burning more gasoline to haul all that extra weight around – about 1 billion gallons more annually, in fact, than they would if drivers today weighed the same as drivers did in 1960. At recent gas prices of $2.20 a gallon, that adds up to $2.2 billion more spent at the pump each year because of America’s weight problem.
“What we have here is a relationship that exists between the obesity epidemic and fuel consumption,” said Sheldon Jacobson, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a co-author of the study. “Now, does it mean we should all go out and lose weight? Of course not. But it does mean that there is a relationship and we should be aware of it.”
The analysis says nothing about the improvements in fuel economy in vehicles since 1960, Jacobson said. It merely looks at how fuel consumption would be different in today’s vehicles if today’s drivers weighed less.
The average man these days weighs 191 pounds, 25 pounds more than in 1960. The average woman weighs 164 pounds, up from 140 pounds in 1960.
The extra 1 billion gallons of gas that their cars are burning through because of the added weight amounts to about three days’ worth of fuel for the 225 million cars, light trucks and SUVs in the United States. Each pound gained by the average person leads to the consumption of 39 million extra gallons of fuel a year, the study found.
Looked at another way, Americans could save enough gas to fuel 1.7 million vehicles for an entire year simply by shedding enough pounds to be as slender as the Americans of 1960, Jacobson said.
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