Price of gas (petrol...)

I filled up the car last night. It's a minivan with a three litre (liter!) petrol engine. A V6. (It's a 2005 Mazda MPV. It's silver, since you ask.)

It seems to do about twenty mumble miles to the US gallon. A US gallon is a bit over 3.5 liters. So that's, what, six miles to the liter? Ouch.

A car like this would be unthinkably expensive to run at home. At £1.10 per litre of petrol, it would break your heart. But here, it just doesn't matter.

I guess the upshot is that it costs about the same to drive a mile here in a normal car as it does to drive a mile in a normal car at home in the UK.

People say gas is cheap here - it cost less than $3 per US gallon to fill up last night - but we adapt to adversity here!

Oh, octane levels: they price gas per octane level here, which somebody pointed was much lower than at home. The gas I put in yesterday was 87. Regular is maybe 90 and premium 93 or 94. I think. Can't remember exactly. In the UK, octane levels are much higher, I'm sure...

(And if I knew what an octane was... ;-)