A few weeks ago I drove my wife to the airport for a trip back to her family’s home. While filling up the gas before leaving town I was considering the price of gas and how rapidly it had risen over the last few weeks. I started considering how what I’d heard about the direction of gas prices and how most of the mainstream media has been indicating that there’s no upper bound in sight for gas prices and I was considering how those prices are going to impact hybrid car sales and availability.

My thinking at the time was that since some SUV manufacturers had seen some sales drop last year when gas prices went up that the same would happen this year, with a corresponding pickup in sales for hybrids (which has since been covered widely in the MSM). One thing that hasn’t been strongly covered is how the market will adapt to the suddenly increased demand.

Wired recently noted

Prius waiting times have stretched six months or more, even with dealers selling above MSRP; the Lexus RX 400h had a preorder list of 18,000 names in January, three months before its release.¹

and

Prius sales rise or fall from month to month in almost direct correlation to the fluctuating price of oil.²

Both sorts of volatility seem to be strong indicators of not only an exploding market, but also of supply problems to come. My thinking (and maybe this is obvious - I’m no economist) is that we’ll see prices for hybrids soar, perhaps to the levels recently enjoyed by luxury SUVs as the market demand peaks. It’s going to take some time for the manufacturers of these automobiles to ramp up to the increased consumer demand - I can’t imagine that any of the auto makers are fitted out for double or treble increases in need for parts, and I further can’t imagine that the manufacturing facilities required are all that similar to the ones for standard autos or that they can be built particularly quickly.

If all of the above is true, the pertinent questions for me concern how long we will have to wait until hybrids are readily available (as in I can drive it off the lot the day I go shopping) and how cheap the cars will become when production is ramped up.

In parallel with all this I’m starting a new experiment in topical blogging, thus the title of this post. I’m going to be taking a photo of the priceboard at every gas station that I fill my tank at, or at least as often as I can manage it. I’m going to post them to Flickr with the tag “gasprices” as well as tag them with the date and the zipcode of the gas station. Where I can manage it I’m going to put a link to the Google map for the station’s location in the photo’s description. It would be interesting to take a look at the data that you could collect from these photos, as well as create a Jon Udell-style tour, and I’d love to see this tagset be more widely spread than just me. However, it looks like I’ll be taking a car trip out east this summer and that itself should provide some interesting data.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 29th, 2005 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Blogging and has the Technorati tags FlickrBlogging Gasprices Hybrid Autos.
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