Brad Brownell at Jalopnik posed a question to readers this week that landed differently than he probably intended. When gasoline hits $10 a gallon, what road trip is still worth taking? It was framed as a fun Saturday thought experiment. It read like a weather report from inside a pressure cooker.
The premise isn’t science fiction anymore. Fuel prices have been, in Brownell’s words, “ping ponging all over the place,” and the trajectory has enough upward momentum that a veteran auto journalist felt comfortable building an entire reader engagement piece around double-digit gas. He didn’t ask “if.” He asked “when.”
Brownell himself isn’t bluffing. He’s planning a 10,000-mile round trip this fall from Northeast Ohio to the Arctic Circle in Alaska, driving a Porsche Cayenne diesel. At $10 a gallon, he estimates $3,500 in fuel alone.
He called it a trip he’s wanted to do for over a decade. The math didn’t stop him. The math just became part of the conversation.
That shift matters more than any specific route recommendation. A decade ago, road trip stories were about freedom, discovery, the open highway. Now they come with a cost-benefit analysis baked in.
Brownell even suggested readers consider swapping gas guzzlers for hypermiling hybrids or trading motorhomes for scooters and tents. The great American road trip is quietly becoming an exercise in fuel arbitrage.
His own history tells the story in miniature. In 2017, he drove a 1976 Porsche 912E across the country, hitting every automotive museum and racetrack he could find. Solo camping, a month on the road.
He hasn’t been able to replicate that feeling since. Nine years later, the idea of doing it again comes with an asterisk and a fuel budget that would have been unthinkable when he first turned the key.
The reader question format is a clever editorial move. It lets the publication surface anxiety without owning it. Jalopnik doesn’t have to say the road trip is dying. It just has to ask readers whether they’d still take one at prices that would have caused riots fifteen years ago.
The answers will write themselves, and the very act of answering normalizes the premise.
California’s Highway One got a telling dismissal. Brownell called the coastal route gorgeous but rarely fun — too many RVs, too many tourists, roads that are straight and lazy. At $10 a gallon, scenic mediocrity becomes an expensive luxury nobody can justify.
The calculus changes. You don’t burn premium fuel on a postcard view you can Google.
What Brownell is really chronicling, whether he means to or not, is the slow repricing of automotive enthusiasm itself. The people who will still road trip at $10 a gallon are the ones who were always going to road trip regardless. They’re the ones with diesel Cayennes and air-cooled 911 Turbos and enough disposable income to treat $3,500 in fuel as an acceptable line item for a life experience.
Everyone else starts doing the math differently. They shorten the trip. They skip the detour. They stay home.
The question wasn’t really about which road trip is worth it. It was about who gets to keep taking them. The answer, at $10 a gallon, is fewer people than last year, and fewer still than the year before.
The open road is still open. The toll just went up.
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