Tire pressure on fuel efficiency

Do you keep your vehicle's tires properly inflated? You could be losing out on 3% of fuel efficiency! According to the US government's website on fuel economy, you could save up to $0.11 per gallon if you properly inflate your tires. Not only do you save gas, the right tire pressure also keeps you and your passengers safer, and reduces tire wear. The fuel economy site has a lot of other great info too on keeping your car in top shape, like changing your air filters, and tuning your engine. All these things may not sound impressive at first, but they all add up! 

Recently, even the presidential candidates have been debating over the tire pressure issue. On July 30th, 2008, Obama said, "Making sure your tires are properly inflated, simple thing, but we could save all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling, if everybody was just inflating their tires and getting regular tune-ups. You could actually save just as much" [from Factcheck.org] McCain has dismissed the argument as seemingly inconsequential. According to Factcheck.org, as a nation, we can save up to 1billion gallons of gasoline per year if we all properly inflated our tires. The effect would be nearly immediate, whereas drilling would take years before we see any increase in our domestic supply. But for the long term, offshore drilling would produce up to 10 times more oil than the tire pressure reduction. You can check out the entire article here. 

But questions remain: How long would it take to get the offshore oil drilling started? We know that the technology we have today is not adequate for this job. How much money would it cost to develop this technology and implement the capital investments? Why not put this money into technology development for renewable energy instead? After all, even the offshore oil will be consumed one day, then what?