[guudasitgets]

I guess what I was getting at was what Matt said. Boils down to this, your not "saving" anything if your throwing money away to just prove a point. Your Ecomodding should be for a real reason, so you have more money in your pocket at the end of the week. Take my Assfire; I have total in it $1000, it had leaky exhaust, O2 sensors mis-reading because of all the holes in the exhaust system. For a year it never went farther than 2 to 3 blocks to a bar so it never warmed up and I'm sure the Catylitic Converter never was at temp and was junk when I pulled it out. The clutch bracket for the clutch cable was broke so the dummy started it in gear and drove it in first gear to the bar and back home this way for who knows how long. The front wheel bearings were nothing but rust to the point where the hubs were smoking by the time I gort it home. I took that car, fixed everything, put new brakes on it, new exhaust and new sensors. Now I replaced the driving I did with my Exploder that I got 16-18mpgs with a car that routinely gets 42-45mpg. I have more money in my pocket every week for not burning as much fuel and the $1000 has already came back in savings. I'm not making any payments every month for a new car and It costs me $17 to drive every week and I can Mod it some more to see just how much more miles per gallon I can get out of it. That is what makes this fun and I'm laughing all the way to the gas station. Sure you can "buy your way" to more gas millage, but in the end it DOES have to pay off. The money HAS to come from someplace. Burning less fuel is good, Burning less fuel and spending very little to acheive that, is much much better. Thats why you see a lot of Metros on this site, there are a lot of repairable Metros out there that some people gave up on. I had three of them. Fix one up and you got yourself a 50mpg car easy! Same goes for a diesel Jetta (more room too). Yes Hybrids are the latest "gadget-to-have" but there are other alternatives. In racing we have a saying, "you can buy your way to the front, but beware of the guy with the two or three year old car that always seems to qualify on the front row".