Meanwhile, in your car...

Depending on your age, you either cry when you see a sign outside of a gasoline station, or you look in awe/amusement as your mom is crying when sees the current price of gas.

This isn't news to anyone-- gas has been expensive for about as long as we've been using it.  This is actually more true than you might expect, after adjusting for inflation, there really is no way around it.  Dead dinosaur jelly costs a fuckton.

the red line there is price adjusted for inflation.  Notice how high it is all the time

I don't want to get side-tracked into economics with this post, so to put it simply: the red line is how much the gas used to cost in relation to how much it costs today.  Also known as, the only metric that makes sense for comparison, because you weren't thinking about gas prices back in 1975.  You only care that prices from back then seem cheaper than they are today.

Unless, of course, your some sort of immortal sonofabitch.  Named Richard.

Now, obviously, gas used to be cheaper- even after adjusting for inflation.  But it never got better than the $1.50 mark, which means that it was never drop-dead cheap.  Sure, if it ever went down that low again we'd collectively piss our pants, then get shitfaced and have the biggest party ever known to man, but the dollar meter on the pump has always been going up faster than the gallon meter.

Recently, the price has been going up at an alarming rate.  In my opinion-- for people who are thinking about getting their own car soon or have just got their first car-- this is a good thing.  You don't even have to be smart to figure out that the price of gas drives innovation into making your car use less of it.  Which is good, by proof of previous points (QED).

It means that when we start going car shopping, our rides'll be spewing a lot less crap into the atmosphere, which is good because the Earth is, in fact, getting warmer, we produce 29 gigatons of CO2 via fossil fuel burning, and carbon dioxide is a green house gas.

Nope, not allowed to debate that.  These are things that are happening-- rate and effect are not being discussed here.  Go straw man somewhere else.

So, then it seems to make sense that we're starting to go to more and more electric based cars.  However, don't count out the internal combustion engine as a murder engine for the environment and your wallet fueled by zombie dinosaurs (I call the novel rights to that!) just yet.

You see, by making some new changes to how we design engines we can totally get 60 to 100 mpg out of our cars.  That's... that's outright mind blowing.  100 miles on a single gallon?  Do you know how astronomically far that is?  You could drive across Rhode Island on a single gallon of gas.  All of it.  An entire state. 1 gallon.

On a single tank of gas (we'll assume your tank holds 12 gallons) you could drive across Colorado.  Longways.  Without ever stopping to get gas.  Ever.

Yeah, the future is so awesome.