Chart of the Month

I have been thinking about doing a feature like chart of the month for some time. DOE's office of transportation technologies (now subsumed in the FreedomCar and vehicle technologies program) has a wonderful feature called fact of the week. Never the less, I think that I may be able to post here some of the charts related to the fuel consumption of US light-duty vehicles. For example one of the readers asked:

Do you have any data on how much of US oil consumption is for automobiles, perhaps broken down by type (cars, trucks, SUVs) etc.?

Answer: U.S. Light-Duty vehicles (which include cars and light trucks) consumed about 550 billion liters of gasoline in year 2004 (1 Gallon ~ 3.78 liters). Of this about 250 billion liters was consumed by the cars and wagons, whereas the SUVs, pickups and vans together consumed about 300 billion liters of gasoline.



Posted by Hello Click on image for a larger picture

As you can see from the picture, fuel use of passenger cars is currently at the same level as in 1970, but the light truck fuel consumption has increased from about 40 billion liters in 1970 to 300 billion liters in 2004. Some other fun numbers you may want to remember from this chart:
Fuel consumption reached about 400 billion liters in 1993.
Between 1978 to 1992, the overall fuel consumption was more or less constant at about 390 billion liters. You can, however, see the rise of the minivans and SUVs in this period that has resulted in the much higher level of fuel consumption we see today.

P.S. posting pictures with the help of Hello is painful.