Gas pains

By Hannah Wever
Review Staff Writer
Published: May 29, 2008

Where there are farmers, there are trucks. In an agricultural place like Orange County, there are lots of pick-ups on the road. And the folks behind the wheels of those trucks are paying a small fortune to put fuel in them. Gasoline is nearly $4 per gallon; diesel costs even more. But in a community whose highways are traveled by Chevys, Dodges and Fords followed by massive farming implements, or pulling loads of livestock or trailer loads of hay, trading in a gas-guzzling heavy-duty truck for a more economical, state-of-the-art hybrid commuter car is absurd.
At Herndon Chevrolet’s Ronnie Deavers said fuel prices are causing some folks to switch from SUVs and trucks to smaller vehicles.
“We’re selling more cars right now than we are trucks,” Deavers said.
But Deavers said the folks whose lifestyles demand towing capacity and four-wheel drive don’t have the option of saving money by driving a gas-sipping sedan.
“Everybody’s complaining about the fuel prices, but it’s not stopping the person who needs a truck,” he said.
For the die-hard truck customers, he added, there’s some consolation: manufacturers are sending trucks out to the showrooms with better and better engineering and fuel efficiency.
Enormous SUVs with the capacity to seat a baseball team have been popular purchases for a number of years. Those big trucks have roomy interiors and roomy gas tanks to match. And a large percentage of Orange County’s population travels to jobs miles away in Culpeper, Fredericksburg, and Charlottesville-and beyond. For those people, it may be more reasonable to give up their roomy SUVs in favor of a money-saving compact that runs on alternative fuels.
Many customers don’t care to spend a small fortune on a tank of gas anymore. The majority of the shoppers who come to Herndon to pick out a more fuel-efficient car, Deavers explained, are commuters, looking to minimize what they pay at the pump.
At Reynolds Colonial Square sales lot, manager Ted Brame said most of his sales are smaller cars with good gas mileage.
“The majority of the people I’ve got coming in now have big trucks and SUVs, and they’ve got big gas bills,” Brame said.
The current demand, he added, is for inexpensive smaller cars that get more miles per gallon, until the price of crude oil drops.
“They want something to get them by until this blows over,” he said-if it does, in fact, blow over.
But from Brame’s perspective, political problems in oil-producing middle eastern countries and a global demand for petroleum products could prevent petrol from dropping back to the comparatively low prices of two or three years ago.