Our Jeep Wagoneer Proves Flying Doesn’t Always Beat Driving
Should you fly or drive for your next vacation? We put it to the test in one scenario.
There’s no dignity in domestic air travel. Between traffic at the airport, paying for the “privilege” to choose your seat, the TSA cattle call, overpriced airport meals, and bad airline food, there truly are better ways to travel. When faced with the need to get from Los Angeles to San Francisco for a weekend, my wife and I assumed the $450 round-trip tickets for the 80-minute flight on Southwest would be the way to go. Just as we were about to click the buy button, our yearlong review Jeep Wagoneer caught my eye in the driveway—what if we could do the trip for less by driving? Thinking about our Wagoneer’s comfy seats, serene cabin, and smooth drive sealed the deal. We’d drive. But was that the right call?
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The Drive
As we rolled out on our own schedule around dawn on a Friday morning, it sure seemed it. Heated seats on, multizone climate control set for individual temperatures, plenty of elbow room, and the stereo blasting, L.A. was in our rearview mirror by the time the sun poked over the horizon. Two and a half hours later, and we were more than halfway there, nearing our turn-off of the ever-boring I-5 corridor to more stimulating roads leading toward The City.
Much to my delight from behind the wheel, the Wagoneer was nowhere near as ponderous as I expected it to be on the narrow two-lane back roads that wind through farm towns, up and over hills, and across earthen dams. The Jeep’s sheer size and the silence of its cabin can contribute to it feeling disconnected from the outside world as you make miles, but on these interesting stretches, I found myself having more fun than expected. In Sport mode, the Jeep’s 420-hp turbocharged straight-six remains as sweet as ever, with the transmission keeping the smooth-revving engine in its broad powerband. The suspension slightly firms up, too, and dropping the air springs down to the Aero ride height setting reduced body roll. Steering feel never really improves, but the added weight of Sport mode makes the Wagoneer easier to place.
Before we knew it, we were in the Bay Area—about two hours quicker than we’d anticipated. After spending two days piloting our big Jeep around San Francisco and using it to tailgate at a Giants game, we turned tail for home, stopping to stock up on fresh produce from the numerous fruit and veggie stands that dot the route between California’s two biggest cities.
Cost Comparison: Driving vs. Flying
How’d we do from a cost/time perspective? We spent $305.68 on 55.26 gallons of the Jeep’s preferred 89 octane over 957.7 miles and roughly 18 hours of driving, including tooling in and around San Francisco. That works out to $0.32 per mile and 17.3 mpg. The drives to San Francisco and back took us 13.5 hours.
But how would a flight compare? Looking at direct flights on Southwest from L.A. to S.F., it would have cost my wife and me between $400 and $460 for two round-trip tickets, with each flight taking about an hour and a half. That time advantage certainly seems to be in the airline’s favor, but including travel time to and from the airport and the need to arrive two hours prior to takeoff, we’re looking at between 11 and 12 hours spent traveling via airline.
While the time factor is certainly in favor of flying—even if the time gap isn’t quite as large as it may initially seem—the cost factor certainly isn’t in this case. The flights work out to between $0.50 and $0.58 per mile, with the numbers looking even worse when you consider the fact that doesn’t include local travel in San Francisco, while the Jeep’s $0.32 per mile figure does. The price delta is even more impressive when you consider the Wagoneer isn’t exactly the most efficient vehicle in our yearlong test fleet, netting an EPA-rated 16/26/19 mpg city/highway/combined. That cost-per-mile figure would certainly drop greatly if we had traveled instead in our long-term Toyota Prius Prime or Polestar 2, for instance.
Ultimately, it certainly feels like we made the right call. With no pressing need to save the extra couple hours driving took versus flying, we traveled more affordably while also having the freedom to relax in the Wagoneer’s comfortable cabin and stop wherever we pleased. As the state of California continues building its ever-delayed high-speed rail system, it’ll be interesting to compare its travel times and cost versus driving and flying. A similar trip on Amtrak’s East Coast high-speed Acela line from Boston to Washington, D.C., for instance, would take about 6 hours and 50 minutes each way and cost about $275 per passenger round trip, while averaging far slower speeds than what the West Coast high-speed rail is supposedly capable of. For now, we’ll continue to grab our Jeep’s keys and just go.
More on Our Long-Term Jeep Wagoneer Series II 4x4:
I generally like writing—especially when it’s about cars—but I hate writing about myself. So instead of blathering on about where I was born (New York City, in case you were wondering) or what type of cars I like (all of ’em, as long as it has a certain sense of soul or purpose), I’ll answer the one question I probably get most, right after what’s your favorite car (see above): How’d you get that job? Luck. Well, mostly. Hard work, too. Lots of it. I sort of fell into my major of journalism/mass communication at St. Bonaventure University and generally liked it a lot. In order to complete my degree senior year, we had to spend our last two semesters on some sort of project. Seeing as I loved cars and already spent a good portion of my time reading about cars on sites such as Motor Trend, I opted to create a car blog. I started a Tumblr, came up with a car-related name (The Stig’s American Cousin), signed up for media access on a bunch of manufacturer’s websites, and started writing. I did everything from cover new trim levels to reviewing my friends’ cars. I even wrote a really bad April Fool’s Day post about the next Subaru Impreza WRX being Toyota-Corolla-based. It was fun, and because it was fun, it never felt like work. Sometime after my blog had gotten off the ground, I noticed that Motor Trend was hiring for what’s now our Daily News Team. I sent in my résumé and a link to my blog. I got the job, and two weeks after graduation I made the move from New York to California. I’ve been happily plugging away at a keyboard—and driving some seriously awesome hardware—ever since.
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