"An inch of time is worth an inch of gold, but it is hard to buy one inch of time with one inch of gold"
Which always says to me that its not worth it just use the quickest option
Take the example drcongo posted:
"Yesterday I had to drive to a nearby town, just 20 minutes away, and noticed that every single petrol station there was a good 5p per litre cheaper than my town. I might plug this into a map."
Assume he uses 30 litres a week (high end of average UK usage) that's £1.50 per week saving but assume the extra miles use half a litre, that takes about 65 p off the saving (ill not go into wear and tear) over 30 years of work 50 weeks a year this means a saving of £1,275 over 30 years ... sounds a lot but
20 mins away - this assumes 40 minutes per week over 50 weeks is 2000 minutes, and over 30 years 60000 minutes. Now assume you are awake for 16 hours a day this equates to 62.5 days of free time - more than two months of awake time
so as the saying goes... which would you prefer £1,275 saving or 62.5 days of time
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.
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.
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.
Just want to say, nothing wrong with doing that. Everyone has different priorities. I just hope most wont have to do it.
However, I think (and hope) the point of this service is that by being public, it'll drive prices down for drivers.
I drive 10 miles round-trip once per month to save what I guesstimate is £5 on a tank of fuel, then spend £100-300 in the Costco store while I'm there. I'm not the target audience, but I hope that for those who drive regularly, or for a living, this can help route them to where they can get the best prices as they're passing by.
Besides, with a smaller tank, you'll make more trips to tank it, and also have less choice to go to gas stations that are further away but have cheaper price. Then again it becomes a question of "Do I want more time or more money?", back to square one :)
Edit: Also, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the fuel pump use fuel itself as a coolant or something? Never investigated myself, but some car-knower once told me that running the tank on low always isn't good for the fuel pump, or something like that. If that's true, running with 10% of the fuel would mean more maintenance too, potentially removing any savings in the first place.
I know very little about these things, but my understanding was always that any form of liquid pump uses the liquid itself as coolant to some extent.
On a related note, my car has a fuel heater, to pre-heat the Diesel before it hits the engine, I assume this is typical in modern cars, but using the fuel as a coolant would presumably contribute positively to this desire for warmer fuel entering the cylinders.
Ultimately how much is your time worth? in the example given drcongo's time is worth £1.28 an hour.
Shopping around for the fuel of an EV you can do from a web browser, oh hey, Octopus have a good deal for night charging, click click done.
edit: My annual milage is actually very low, so it definitely wouldn't be worth it, but I appreciated the maths either way.
In the US gasoline short distance price variations are ridiculous. I've seen it where one station was $3.50/gal and another station on the same main road just a 30 second drive away was $4.30/gal. These two stations almost always have a large difference like that. This kind of large difference over a small distance is common all over the country.
Yet a surprisingly large number of people will always choose the more expensive station, even if they know about both of them (and the other stations with prices consistently in between that are also about equally close). There's nothing about the layout of the town and traffic patterns that make the expensive station more convenient, or make it easy to find. All these stations are about equally busy so it is not like the expensive one is faster. The less expensive one even has a way better convenience store.
This is one of the higher gas price states and people are constantly complaining about how much it costs to fill up, and when I ask complainers about where they buy gas it is often the expensive stations.
Many of them think that if they don't buy at the expensive station it will be bad for their car. Different brands add different detergents and additives that fight clogging and build up of deposits in your engine and fuel system.
However in 1995 the US got a federal standard that all gas has to meet, and then in 2004 several major car makers developed a standard they called "Top Tier" which is about 20 times more effective than the federal standard. Most major gas brands now sell only gas that is certified to meet the Top Tier standard.
Most testing has found that going for something beyond Top Tier doesn't really have a significant benefit for most people. For nearly everyone the best approach is:
(1) Avoid gas that is not at least Top Tier. Generally the only places that sell gas that isn't at least Top Tier are grocery store brands and maybe some convenience store brands. The savings with those brands is usually only a couple or so cents a gallon compared to the least expensive Top Tier brands (ARCO, Costco) and your car will perform better (including improved mpg) and need less maintenance.
(2) Buy the least expensive Top Tier or above gas that is convenient. You aren't going to notice any difference in performance or maintenance if you pay extra for some brand's particular proprietary blend.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/report-your-fuel-prices-and-fore...
So looks as though the requirement to report was only just introduced, hence the considerable missing data.
Edit: BBC reporting here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp80dpzdg37o
Yeah. It was formally announced in the November 2025 budget and launched today.
Companies do not understand "must" unless it's accompanied by a proven threat of sanctions that outweighs the profits made by breaching the regulation. The GDPR is a good example of plenty of "musts" and theoretical fines but lax enforcement means it's always more profitable to breach it than comply.
Looking at that document, this regulation is dead on arrival. Enforcement is contingent on the aggregator noticing the price discrepancy, giving the seller many opportunities to rectify the situation without a penalty (if we assume every step gives them 30 days to respond, we're looking at ~5 months before a financial penalty becomes possible), and even then, the regulatory "may" impose a financial penalty, meaning it isn't even guaranteed.
You know what would immediately resolve this problem and prevent non-compliance? A reporting system where any citizen can submit evidence of a price discrepancy and upon validation gets a 1k payout from the government who then recovers it via a fine. This would make it sustainable for anyone to act as an "auditor" or even do this as a business.
Of course, the reason it isn't done this way is because it would be too effective, where as this current iteration gives the appearance that something is being done while having no impact in practice.
If you live on the Irish border, you'll have a choice between getting your petrol on the UK side, or the Irish side. For about 20 years, petrol was cheaper on the Irish side, causing a bunch of petrol stations to spring up just over the border, attracting drivers from the other side with cheap prices and good exchange rates.
In the last 10 years or so, the position has reversed. Petrol is now roughly cheaper on the UK side of the border, or at least not worth making a special trip for.
There's even a petrol station in Belleek mentioned here[1] that straddles the border and apparently has or had pumps on both sides.
[1]: https://www.impartialreporter.com/news/25653110.border-filli...
https://www.fuelwatch.wa.gov.au/
Nice to see the UK come onboard.
Preview:
https://bf31ed2a-ec85-460a-a503-fa9bf86bf63b.paged.net/
Source:
https://github.com/markwylde/uk-fuel-price-map
You have to download the CSV manually from the gov.uk link.
https://www.developer.fuel-finder.service.gov.uk/apis-ifr/in...
It doesn't mention any filters beyond batch number and effective start date. They're definitely storing the lat-lon information though, so it would be nice to do area-based queries, especially if you're building an app with a map view.
Edit: after asking AI about this I would say the CSV is pretty useless as a comprehensive source of info on UK fuel prices.
But they also need a little WebUI for stations to manually update prices, since small stations won't have a programmer on staff to do this stuff.
I wouldn't look forward to having to do that every time I changed prices!
I wonder how many small independent stations are there these days? Almost every one I see is either in a supermarket, a big chain like Esso, or a smaller chain like Harvest.
this is the only reason I use waze!
They certainly love spending taxpayer money on nothing don't they.
This is not a new sites. Its making data more available so sites and apps will have more accurate data. This is most likely to benefit those who are willing to trade convenience for lower costs.
This is a funny take, because we ostensibly assume 'perfect information' when we extol the virtues of capitalism. It would appear the government is supporting capitalism with this particular initiative...
Until this we assume marginality holds true and price dispersion has a benefit in society that we unwittingly enable.