Cheap fuel?

With the cost of petrol and diesel seeming to rise almost every day you might be tempted to do that extra bit of shopping around to save a penny or two on a litre. Be careful though as most of the time you may as well not bother.  Here’s why.

I’ve made a lot of assumptions but:

• The average family car gets 40 miles per gallon or 14.09 kilometres per litre and with fuel at £1.35 per litre costs 9.6p per kilometre in fuel
• The average car will take about 50 litres to be full.
• The average speed of a car is 31.25 miles per hour or 50 kilometres an hour
• The average salary in the UK is £26k per year and people are awake for 16 hours per day which makes the average financial life cost of a person at £4.45 per hour or 7.4p per minute.

Taking all this into account, a car covers 0.833 kilometres in a minute at a fuel cost of 8p and a life cost of 7.4p, a combined cost of 15.4p. To save a penny a litre you have 3 minutes and 20 seconds that can be added to your journey to make the saving or 6 minutes 15 seconds if you are not bothered about your own value.  Clearly a two pence saving gives you twice as much time but the bigger the car, the more money you earn or the greater the number of people that are in the car, the less time you have to make any saving.

In essence (no pun intended) the only time that it is definitely worth deciding which garage to choose on price alone, is from the petrol stations that you pass every day in your journey.