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One of the guys in a noon tennis group I play with once a week said after a recent match that his Honda hybrid gets 55 miles to a gallon of gasoline. The topic came up when I commented on the rising cost of driving a dozen miles to play tennis at UW-La Crosse.

Standing next to his car at the tennis courts, I tried not to drool on its glossy gray finish as I admired the sleek aerodynamic style. And then I went home to do the calculations that many of us are doing now that gas prices have lunged to $4 a gallon.

For example, if we drove Paul’s hybrid to Colorado to visit our new granddaughter, we could save $236 on the cost of the gasoline. We drive a Subaru Outback that gets about 25 miles per gallon so it would use about 108 gallons to drive the 2,700 miles to Ouray and back. That amounts to $432 at $4 a gallon. The hybrid at 55 mpg would use only 49 gallons for the same distance or $196.

Using the $4 per gallon figure driving 10,000 miles a year would cost $1,600 at 25 mpg and $732 at 55, a difference of $868.

Saving that much money would be welcome, but would it justify the $20,000 cost of trading in one of our cars for a hybrid? Probably not in the short term, particularly since the promise of plug-in electric cars is so intriguing to us. They may be available within a few years when we would have more completely depreciated the cars we already own. Our energy investment would probably be better-spent installing solar panels for the house.

So the question remains on what strategies to use to economize now.

We’ve known for a long time that slowing down can have a significant impact on gas mileage. If we drove 55 miles per hour on the Colorado trip we could save as much as 20 percent on mileage, compared with 70 mph, according to a government Web site on fuel economy. That probably doesn’t take into account some of the winds we run into on the High Plains, however.

But even a 15 percent improvement would knock $64 off the cost of gas for the trip. Gretchen gasped when I mentioned it: “Six more hours in the car!”

And I have anxiety-inducing images of 18-wheelers looming large in the rear view mirror if we slow down too much on some of the freeways headed west.

Such are the tradeoffs we might be facing; it offers an explanation why we hear nothing whatsoever about lowering speed limits as we did in the 1970s even though we know it would reduce our gas consumption. We’d rather blame Congress or the oil companies for the high prices, I guess.

While our family visits to Colorado and Shawano are essential to us, we can be more careful how we use the car at home, combining grocery shopping with other chores. And I try to schedule other La Crosse appointments on my tennis day, for example.

USA Today reported in 2004 — when gas prices averaged $2 a gallon — that analysts were saying then that it would take $4 a gallon gas prices “for consumers to park their cars or buy smaller vehicles.”

Well the $4 prices have arrived and the analyst who was scoffed at when he predicted $100-a-barrel oil is now saying that $200-a-barrel oil is likely. That would mean gas prices of $7 to $8 a gallon. (Our friends in Sweden say gas there sells for $8 a gallon.)

At $7 a gallon the difference between an annual gas bill at 25 versus 55 mpg is $1,527 and our twice-a-year trips to Colorado would cost $756 in gas … each. That makes changing wheels more compelling doesn’t it?