I like the nice simple truck, but the fuel costs over 38 years... Keep in mind that due to inflation, $1 in 1976 is like $4.15 today. So if gas was $0.59/gal that is like $2.50 today.
I'd recon $2.25 is a fair comparative average price since 1976 (eyeballing the chart below), and 10mpg (probably a little generous) over 300k miles is like a total of $70k spent in fuel in 2014 dollars. He could have bought 52 ~$1000 ~40mpg econoboxes and still broke even (1.3 econoboxes/year) on the fuel savings...
granted the used econobox selection wasn't what it is today, just saying, don't ignore the long term costs of crappy mpg.
