Calculate the cost of hitting the road

Planning a summer road trip? Costtodrive.com calculates the cost of gasoline in seconds.

What’s hot: Punch in your starting point and destination, add the year, make and model of the car you’re driving, then click the little red gas pump and find out how much it will cost you to get there. Besides telling you how much your gasoline will cost, Costtodrive.com also tells you how many miles you will travel and how long it will take to get there. Travelers will appreciate the side-by-side information from Kayak that tells you how much it would cost to fly instead. Need directions? It has a Google map of your route, plus a link to directions from Mapquest and Yahoo and Google maps. Once you’ve used the calculator, don’t be surprised if you start questioning what kind of car you drive. It costs only $18.16 to drive from L.A. to San Francisco (one way) in a 2005 Toyota Prius, but the site says it’s $45.41 in a 2008 Ford Explorer.

What’s not: The simplicity helps make the site successful. Even the few ads on the page are fairly unobtrusive compared with other websites. The one thing I’d look forward to is a European version for travelers who rent cars while traveling abroad.

-- Jen Leo