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Comment by entuno | Hacker News Reader

I almost never go out of my way for fuel, because as you say, it's rarely worth it once you factor in your time (never mind the fuel spent).

But it's still useful to know about price variation so that you can plan ahead. I regularly drive past several different petrol stations, and if I know that one of them is usually cheaper or usually more expensive then I choose to use or avoid it, or to decide that I'll fill up tomorrow when I'm going that way rather than today at a more expensive one.

And that'd be more useful built into satnav, so that if I know I have to fill up somewhere along my route then I can pick the cheapest place, since there's no real time cost to any of the options compared to each other.

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totally agree, technology could make this much more cost effective (or time effective). what's the best use of my time versus the cheaper option..

It's interesting running the numbers though. e.g. if it only take 10 minutes to get cheaper fuel, how much cheaper does it need to be for your time to be worth more than the UK minimum wage (£12.21 for adults over 21)

based on my maths (from above calculations) it needs to be about 7p per litre cheaper to justify the extra 10 minutes and for your time to be worth more, per hour, than the minimum wage.

Also depends on the size of your fuel tank and how full it already is. The time taken to refuel is (almost) the same regardless, but if you've got a 40l fuel tank vs a 70l one or you're only half-empty then it's going to be less worthwhile.

7p cheaper for 10 minutes works out at about minimum wage if you're buying 30 litres, but with a bigger car you could easily be buying twice that, which works out much better.

Although of course you also need to factor in how much fuel you burn driving to the cheaper place, and the extra wear and depreciation on the car. If you take the HMRC standard rate of 45p/mile (which was meant to cover all of that kind of thing, but hasn't been updated for years) then even going a few miles out of your way quickly ends up costing more than it's likely to save.

mostly such tools are useful when you go very close to a few petrol stations on your regular routes anyway. I can pretty much time topups for when the cheapest station locally is en-route to my destination

A 7p per litre difference does sound like the difference between local station and motorway prices though, and they probably will have factored in that opportunity cost of time...

> A 7p per litre difference does sound like the difference between local station and motorway prices though, and they probably will have factored in that opportunity cost of time...

Only 7p?

Motorway services have shocking price markups, way more than 7p. Most people don't realise this or are just too lazy to find something that isn't quite as convenient.

According to the live feed at https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/fuel-watch/ I see:

    Unleaded is 131.80p (UK wide) and 156.80p (Motorway Service Area).

That's nearly a 20% markup.

Last time I drove into a motorway services and saw prices ~20p/litre higher I just drove through the petrol station and found a local garage to fill up at.

It’s not a matter of “quite as convenient”, it’s a matter of figuring where you are, find a nearby town, finding a petrol station in it and getting back to the motorway. This can take well over half an hour. Time that you really need to be spending getting to your destination because there’s a good chance your trip is going to take most of the day.

Someone for whom this takes over half an hour might be better off taking the train

Petrol in the U.K. is insanely cheap. When I passed my test I could buy 4.5 litres with an hours work at minimum wage, which would get me about 30 miles. Today an hour at minimum wage gets me 9.4 litres and takes me over 100 miles.

Spending an extra £10 once or twice a year when driving a few hundred miles and thus needing to fill up at a motorway is nothing. Chances are I’m spending that much on an overpriced coffee when I do that anyway.

tbf I was thinking more of the ones on junctions off A roads local to me which are more 137-9p

Ironically I had to do a small topup on the M4 today, and yeah, that was mad!

I once had the idea to do something like this, though the intention was to pitch it to gas station operators as a way to keep their prices competitive (i.e. alert them when the station down the street drops their prices so that they can too and not lose business to casual price shoppers or, alternatively, when the station down the street raises their prices, so that you can too and not lose revenue needlessly) and learned that there are a couple entities, at least in the US, that have national data here. I couldn't even figure out how to contact one, and when I called the other I was essentially laughed off the phone by someone with a VERY New York accent -- it seems from context that their data is VERY expensive and used by Wall St. types, so the idea of some nobody from flyover country essentially reselling it to mom & pop gas station operators was funny, and out of the question.

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