Recent jumps in gas prices have seemingly driven them [sic] to adopt a new chic habit: letting their cars run out of fuel on the highway.

Allstate has announced that the number of Californians running out of gas on the highway jumped 17% in the first 5 months of 2008 compared to the same time period in 2007. Additionally, AAA of Northern California saw a 6.5% increase in stranded “empty-tankers” in April.

Phil Telgenhoff, Allstate assistant field vice president for California had this to say about it:

“We can’t directly correlate this rise in the number of people running out of gas to the rise in prices at the pump, but anecdotally we know that consumers are trying hard to stretch their dollar and sometimes that means stretching fuel into fumes.

In California, the highway patrol hands out free gas to stranded motorists and AAA will do the same. There has been speculation that this is one of the reasons people choose to let their tanks go empty.

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