So you’re interested in buying a fuel efficient car, but you don’t have $25 grand to throw down on a new Toyota Prius?  You probably also noticed that leasing is dead and great loans can be hard to find.  There’s good news for you.  First, buy a used car and if you’re not sure why, check out my Top 10 Reasons for Buying a Used Car.  Second, you don’t’ have to buy a hybrid to get really good gas mileage.  It’s a myth and it’s propagated by our local, state, and federal governments that do things like give out subsidies for hybrid vehicles or use taxpayer money to help car manufacturers develop hybrid technology.  What’s really important is fuel efficiency – hybrid or not.

To generate this list, Google Trends was used to figure out which high fuel efficiency cars are searched for the most frequently on the web.  Here are the results:

There are a few surprising things about this list:

• 7 out of 10 are foreign made
• Toyota snagged 3 spots on this top 10 list
• Chevrolet nabbed 2 spots on the list (who knew?)
• Chevrolet Volt would be #10, but it’s not in production until 2010
• The Geo Metro and the Geo Tracker came close to making it on this list even though they aren’t in production any longer
• Dodge, Hyundai, Isuzu, Kia, Mazda, Pontiac, Saturn, Scion, Subaru, and Volkswagen should all have something on this list, but none of their cars came even close due to either a low search volume or the complete lack of a high fuel efficiency car

Now that you’ve seen the list, go out and get the high gas mileage car of your choice and make sure you buy one that’s two years old so that you’re getting the best deal, being environmentally friendly, and saving a TON of money using Carsala!

In the used car market, being picky about color is more expensive than air conditioning, an automatic transmission, or leather seats.  Who knew?  Well, now you know and you can save a ton of money by knowing this too.

Since Carsala recently gave me the keys to their amazing price quoting tool, I have been playing around with car prices based on different options.  White and silver are the most popular colors in used cars and each of these colors comprises about 15-20% of any type of car.  This means that if I’m shopping for a used car and decide I only want silver, then for every 100 cars on the market I am only interested in 15 to 20 of them.  That limits my choices and limits the discount I’ll get when I go to buy a car.

Here’s a chart with examples of the premium you will pay if you’re picky about color:

To generate the above chart, I calculated savings off of Blue Book value with a single color compared to not having a color preference.  I looked at cars within 100 miles of where I live because I figured that is about how far an average person would drive for a really good deal on a car.  For savings in dollar value, I assumed that all the used cars cost $20,000 even though many of these cars can be bought for much less than this price – this assured the savings values made sense relative to each other.

If you do choose to buy a car using Carsala, they can quote using a combination of colors.  So if you like any color except red for example, they can quote it this way too.  In these types of cases, color may not impact price or savings, but its’ great to know that if you are being really selective about color, it could cost you well over two thousand dollars.

Leave some comments below about what colors you like/love/hate (and why).  Here’s a chart of the most popular colors for 2008.  Remember that if there are fewer cars on the market of the color you want, then the more you’ll pay if you insist of having that specific color.