Matching Travel Trailer

I created this Mazda5 trailer digitally with GIMP today but someday I think that it would be pretty awesome to create one for real.

On my way down to pick up Jacob from Louisiana, I managed to get 28.75 mpg in the car.  Almost all of that driving was on flat stretches of highway on a beautiful, still day with the car fully cleaned out in preparation for our road trip the following day.

Coming back from Virginia, I was checking our fuel consumption with every fill up.  And, at one point it actually got down to 14.5 mpg.  The difference was that we were driving east to west (into the wind), we had 5 passengers, we were traveling over the Blue Ridge and Appalachian mountains, and we had the top of the car loaded down with my DIY roof rack, all of our luggage, a running stroller, and some more stuff given to us that we were bringing home from our friends' house.  We pretty much lost all aerodynamics with the return trip.

This is why I would like to have a trailer such as the fictitious one pictured above.  It's unique.  It's stylish.  It's already equipped with the proper lights.  It's roomy.  It's lockable.  It's long enough to sleep in on a camping trip.  With two sliding doors, it's very accessible.  And, it's aerodynamic.  I found a pretty cool resource that would help me find one for cheap, too.  It's called Salvage-Cars-For-Sale.info.  This site helps me search for a wrecked Mazda5 or whatever make and model I choose.  With a cutting torch, some sheet metal, a welder, some primer and paint I could have myself one of these bad boys.  Plus, I could potentially salvage the motor, electronics, seats, etc. and either sell them to reduce the cost of the salvage purchase or save them in case I might need them for our vehicle.

I don't know if my wife would approve of such a purchase.  But, I sure would like to get one if we ever intend to do something like this trip again.  After all, we traveled a whopping 3,382 miles in total in only 10 days time.  Once out of the mountains, I was still only getting 17 mpg with all of our weight and stuff on top.  I estimate that if we were pulling a trailer like the one shown above, we would likely get about 23 mpg instead of averaging around 17.  The 6 mpg improvement would've equated to $181 in gas savings.  And, I'm being realistically conservative with these numbers.  I'll concede that we would likely never travel so much as to have it completely pay for itself.  But, the usefulness of it on the trips we did take it I believe would make it worth the cost.

Here are some real world examples that I found of people doing the same thing but with different cars.

Posted in: automobiles,DIY,family,GIMP,green,photography,software