The fuel efficiency of governors

Glenn Reynolds:

GLOBAL WARMING UPDATE: Burning fossil fuels with helicopters and Cadillacs in Massachusetts. Of course, with the weather they're having now, a pro-global-warming stance might be smart politics!

Har Har. Actually, the snow has been quite welcome here considering how dry it's been all winter, but whatever. The Boston Herald article he links to describes Deval Partick's car choices:

Patrick’s new car is one of Cadillac’s finest vehicles with a price tag that starts at $42,000. By comparison, Crown Victorias, which are the vehicle of choice for police and government agencies, start at $26,000. The DTS is the 2007 version of the DeVille and is the largest luxury sedan made by Cadillac.

So the base price of the DTS is higher than Mitt Romney's Crown Victoria by about $16,000. That's really not that much money for an economy the size of Massachusetts'. But what about fuel efficiency?

A side-by-side comparison reveals that there is no difference between the two cars. Combined mpg for both is 20, greenhouse gas emissions is 9.3 tons / year Crown Vic, 9.2 tons / year DTS. So as far as the car goes, Patrick isn't any better or worse than his predecessor Mitt Romney.

Personally, I would have liked to have seen Deval Patrick make a statement by purchasing a hybrid. I don't know what vehicles the state police allows the governor to choose from, but it seems reasonable to think that a Ford Escape hybrid, with 34 mpg combined and greenhouse gas emission of 5.4 tons / year could be outfitted with the necessary security details. The base price is around $26,000, similar to the Crown Vic.

As far as the helicopter is concerned, I'll grant Instapundit that point since Romney used it only once while in office, whereas Patrick has used it a few times thus far and plans to use it whenever he has a tight schedule.

And yes, I would fault any governor for not taking the T; maybe service would improve if top-level officials actually took public transportation every so often to know what it's like.