Why High Gas Prices in Europe Are No Big Deal

The USA is dealing with all kinds of problems and some are about to get worse. But there’s one thing that is sure to be a safe conversation starter in any situation: talking about high gas prices and what it costs to fill up your tank.

As I write this, a gallon of gas is three to four bucks in the USA, depending on where you live, but if it goes up a dollar or more from there, like it did when we came out of the pandemic, then look out. The sky is falling! The subject will come up daily on newscasts and in conversations wherever people gather.

With a reliance on Russian oil and higher taxes on fuel to fund infrastructure, you’ll find a far different attitude on the other side of the Atlantic. They’re used to high gas prices in Europe so that’s way down the list of things to worry about. They’re also more practical and logical about climate change, so they’ve prepared for the future instead of staying stuck in the fossil fuel past. 

Sensible Cars for Transportation Instead of Status Symbols

Why is this? Well, there are a few factors, but let’s start with the kinds of cars the mostly slim Europeans drive compared to what the mostly overweight Americans drive. It probably doesn’t help that an average American male over 40 weighs close to 200 pounds and a typical woman of that age weighs 176. While the average American has been forced—kicking and screaming mainly—to evolve to vehicles that get better gas mileage, Europeans have been driving practical cars for decades.

Their cars already got good gas mileage so they’re not having to go hunt for a hybrid now or have an electric car shipped across the country since all of them are sold out locally. Since they’ve routinely paid twice as much for fuel so that countries could properly fund their infrastructure projects, they have smartly driven cars that will go as far as possible with that fuel. 

I’m writing this from Italy, where they’ve long produced stylish small cars that are more common than large ones. In the new era, however, they’ve also smartly gravitated to electric cars to bring down the costs and pollution even more. When you walk through Rome now, this kind of scene is typical, not an oddity. 

Those cars are so small that they can park perpendicular to the street instead of parallel! It gives a new meaning to parallel parking. We watched one navigate into a space between two motorcycles. Since these cars are more common than not, you don’t see ads during sporting events meant to make men think they need a giant pickup truck to compensate for their manhood issues. Here they put that money into dressing well instead. (They also don’t have to fit an obese body into the car or struggle getting in and out since their joints are shot.)

When I originally put this post up back in 2022, gas prices were between $4.50 and $5.50 per gallon apart from a few outliers at the top and bottom. And Americans were freaking out! By comparison though, prices in Europe are measured by liter and were between €1.70 and €2.40, again with a few outliers on each side. A US gallon is 3.78 liters, which means that they were paying an average of 7.75 euros or $8.22 per gallon in the dollar equivalent across the continent.

If you were driving a big SUV around Europe instead of the USA, a $200 purchase at the pump would probably not even fill up your tank. 

When I asked Europeans in Spain what they thought of the current gas prices during my 2022 visit, they would respond with something like, “Yes, they’re a little higher. Putin’s war…” Then they would change the subject to something more important, like what we were going to be ordering for dinner. 

After all, most of their taxis in Spain are hybrids or electrics. So are many of the passenger cars. If not they’re mostly small and efficient vehicles that do what most people need them to do: provide transportation.

Besides, there’s a great train system, light rail, metros, good bus routes, and on it goes. 

Trains are a High Priority in Europe

Because they’ve had those higher fuel taxes for years, European countries have invested in infrastructure. Like high-speed trains that make Amtrak look like a sad joke. Here are the trains that had just pulled into the station in Cordoba when I arrived. This is for a city of 344,000 in the metro area and the station supports 16 train stops a day.

In the station I had a great meal and a cappuccino in the restaurant while the guy beside me was drinking a glass of wine with his cheese platter. There’s a restaurant, a coffee shop, multiple shopping options, and clean bathrooms. The train station in Seville (pictured in my most recent post about travel prices in Spain) has enough stores to consider it a shopping mall. The arrivals and departures board looked like one from an airport.

This year I was in the station of Regensburg, Germany at 7:00 in the morning and the place was as busy as any airport you’ve been to, multiple trains per hour coming in and out, in a small city you’ve probably never heard of. When we arrived in Bologna, Italy on the other end, there were more than 20 trains arriving within an hour on the board. 

When you’re on the train in Spain, it’s fast. Really fast. And it never stops to wait for a freight train to move. These are dedicated tracks moving passengers from point to point efficiently, with low fuel use. Once we pulled out of the station for any of the four trips I took, the only stops we made were five-minute ones to load and unload people. Then we were off again. 

It was also cheaper to take the train than it would have been to deal with the high gas prices in Europe. Which brings us to another big difference between the two continents: incentives.

Americans’ Incentives to Be Car-Obsessed

Like it or not, humans are driven (forgive the pun) by incentives. Make them think the product of squished swamps from the Jurassic era will be cheap and plentiful forever and you get giant Chevy Suburbans driven by soccer moms and giant pickups driven by people who seldom need to haul anything. When you look around you at rush hour, the majority of these thirsty hulks will have just one person at the wheel.

If there’s a clear message through relentless advertising that a gas guzzler makes you manly, then men who have confidence issues will go into great debt to drive one. Then they’ll blame how much money they’re spending on gas on someone else, like the president, but not themselves. 

If you have an incentive to conserve, however, you find a better solution that’s less wasteful. Governments and utilities find other ways to generate power. People have a reason to put solar panels on their roof and charge an electric car with them. Or bike to work. Or take public transportation. They earn status in other ways instead. 

Many U.S. consumers, the kind who made fun of me when I drove a Prius and spent next to nothing on fuel, are kicking themselves when a world crisis of some kind leads to a spike in fuel prices. Suddenly there’s a reactionary rush to switch out the gas guzzler for something better. For many of them, they waited too long. They weren’t prepared for a shock to the global system. Here’s a quote from a Kelley Blue Book story about what was happening at car dealerships back in 2022: 

Dealers have a thin supply of hybrids and fuel-efficient small cars to sell. You’ll have a much easier time finding a full-size truck or 3-row SUV in dealer stock.

The worse the fuel efficiency, the longer the vehicles were sitting on the lot, three or four times as long as the quick-moving hybrids. Now as I’m updating this in 2024, supply chain issues have eased up and prices are back to historic norms, but good luck still just walking onto a Toyota lot and driving off in a Prius. It’s much easier to drive off with a hulking SUV with terrible fuel efficiency.

That’s not an issue in most of Europe though. The only people who buy pickup trucks are farmers and other people who haul things for their job. It’s not a compensation device. If you see someone in a big SUV, your first thought is that they’re a Russian oligarch on the run.

I’m sure if I drove on Germany’s Autobahn I’d see some sleek Italian sportscars getting horrendous gas mileage as they zoom by me, but anyone driving one of those also isn’t complaining about gas prices at the pump. That expenditure pales in comparison to what it costs to fill up their yacht. If they have enough money to buy a Ferrari or two, fuel costs are not in their sphere of concern. So they’re not whining either. 

For a whole lot of reasons, my fellow Americans who love to dish out blame always dish out plenty for high gas prices—while seemingly forgetting that factors like war, sanctions, OPEC collusion, and shipping bottlenecks are more likely to impact the costs. Across the ocean though, high gas prices in Europe rarely make the news. 

If you want to see what I saw in Spain while I was there, check out that video posted further up that I did for YouTube. I’ll leave you with this shot from Bulgaria though: this is what a Mercedes parked near my rental apartment this morning looked like. A Mercedes! 

The next day I spotted this one, also a Mercedes: 

One of the tiny car models I’ve seen in Italy was not a Fiat or Citreon, but a Ford. Yes, the American car brand. They could sell this model in the USA and it would be great for people who mostly drive in cities, but it doesn’t fit well into the U.S. ad campaigns that are all about big and brawny vehicles for extra-wide humans. 

In Europe, Electric Cars are Cool

I keep coming back to marketing because it really does matter. In Europe they’ve marketed what’s best for the planet instead of what’s best for the kind of off-road trail riding that almost nobody does. The best example is Norway, which produces plenty of fossil fuel, but has tried hard to get everyone off of it for the sake of our future. 

Here’s the result, which I highlighted in a recent issue of Nomadico: 

Even though Norway is a major fossil fuel producer, they’ve put the planet first and encouraged everyone to switch to electric vehicles. It’s working, bigtime, according to the latest stats. In September, 96.4 percent of all new cars registered in Norway were purely electric. There are now more EVs on the road there than gas vehicles.

Based on what I’m seeing in Italy and recently saw in Germany and Austria, they are not alone in successfully changing public perception. The USA is a much tougher nut to crack in that area, of course, since half the country is so easily swayed by misinformation that they’ll swallow a continuous stream of lies and take it as gospel. The media stokes identity politics and it’s much easier to get the ignorant riled up and angry. 

Still, economic incentives do usually win out in the end, which is why American business has gone all-in on renewable energy even if one party of the government is still in love with fossil fuel and pollution, still denying that we have a climate problem as every year gets worse for destructive weather.

By the time those politicians come around it’ll be too late, but thankfully the economic incentives usually win out in the end with consumers. It has already shifted with home solar and hybrid cars and eventually we’ll get to a shift to electric cars. Right about when gas prices go up again, those electric cars will be looking a lot more attractive. Just like they already are across the Atlantic. High gas prices in Europe are no big deal.