[dirtboy]

However, I would suspect that July driving is ALWAYS much higher than November in normal times. Vacations, more later in the day activites, etc.

Yep, if you look at a chart of several years of US gasoline consumption, you get a distinct annual peak-and-valley look, with the peak in summer and the valley in winer, and the oddball being the massive dropoff due to $4+/gallon gas in 2008.

This analysis would have a lot more meaning if it compared December 2010 to December 2011. But in Googling the basic concept, you can see that December 2011 gasoline consumption was the lowest in 15 years, so something is afoot. But this story gives us no working idea of the scope of such.

[C. Edmund Wright]

I totally agree with your assessment.