For the past couple years, complaints about rising gas prices have been met with responses such as "When you adjust for inflation, it's still much cheaper than it was in the late 70's early 80's". Well, we can now say that this is no longer true. Even when you adjust for inflation, we are currently hovering right around the all-time high prices. Take a look at the graph:


Source: http://www.inflationdata.com/inflation/Inflation_Rate/Gasoline_Inflation.asp

In the graph (yearly average price), you will see that the previous peak in 2007 dollars was around 1980 when the average price for the year was around $3.05/gallon. Obviously, since this graph is averaged out per year, some of the high peaks we have already seen this year will be smoothed out. But there may have been enough high days in this year to push our yearly average above the previous high.

So, we might end up having to say that 2007 was the most expensive gas year ever.