Are your petrol costs spinning out of control? (From South Wales Argus)

Are your petrol costs spinning out of control?

3:20pm Thursday 7th May 2009

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While we’re nowhere near the heights of last year’s pump prices, the government’s 2p-a-litre hike in fuel duty from September means we’re creeping near the pound a litre value again.

Yet you can hugely slam down the cost of petrol and diesel.

Some may be able to cut their annual fuel bill by a third. It’s all about combining three easy steps.

Step 1. Find the cheapest petrol station.

The fuel market isn’t that competitive, as most of the price is made up of tax.

Typically for a 93p litre, 54p of that is fuel duty and another 12p is taken in VAT leaving 21p for the manufacturer and 6p for the retailer. So there isn't much room to play with.

Yet savings of 3% to 5% are possible by switching from the most expensive retailers to the cheapest.

Using fuel to drive around and find the cheapest forecourt somewhat defeats the point, so the best way to do this is online.

Petrolprices.com will find the cheapest forecourt in your area.

After registering, enter your postcode and tell it how far you're willing to travel (two, five, 10 or 20 miles).

It'll then list today's cheapest petrol stations in that area for unleaded, diesel, LPG and other fuels.

Slightly different, but no less useful, is KeepMoving.co.uk, which’ll show you the cheapest petrol stations along a given route, so if you're planning a journey, this is the site to use.

The differences in price may be just pennies per litre, but it can add up to £200 worth of savings in a year for regular drivers.

Step 2. Increase your car’s efficiency

Minor vehicle tweaks could knock 15% off the cost of motoring, because most of us make our cars work too hard, and that means using more petrol.

For someone spending £50 a week on fuel, each percentage point saved cuts your cost by £25 a year.

• Keep your tyres correctly inflated. Lower tyre pressure increases the drag on a car, meaning you need more fuel. Simply checking the tyres regularly isn't just safer; it can increase your car's efficiency by 3%.

• Get rid of the junk in your trunk. It’s not a personal comment ladies! The lighter your car, the less effort it takes it to accelerate.

So whether it's an old chair you rarely use or a dog box, declutter all non-essentials, and it will use nearly 2% less fuel.

• Take your roof rack off. Roof racks add massive wind resistance to a car, forcing it to work harder. Take off anything that makes your car less aerodynamic. Even closing windows will make a difference. All this can improve efficiency by 2%.

• Turn off the air con. Air con is a massive drain on fuel; switch it off and you can make an 8% energy saving.

• Don't fill up all the way. Fuel is heavy, so filling the tank to the brim adds quite a weight.

Filling up slightly more often and putting less in – keeping the car half to three-quarters full – will make it run more efficiently.

Then again, you may run out of fuel more quickly, necessitating an urgent trip.

• Step 3. The big one ... low fuel driving.

This is where the massive savings are to be made. The savings here make those from the other tips look like just a drip a super-tanker.

You can drive the same distance in the same time yet use considerably less fuel just by simply driving more smoothly.

The RAC estimates some boy or girl-racer types can cut driving costs by up to 60%. More importantly, most of these won’t actually cost you time.

• Speed up smoothly. Remember the accelerator is a money pedal, so you want to press it as little and as softly as necessary.

This will mean you take longer to reach your top speed, not that you’ll go slower. A good rule of thumb is to keep the rev count under 3000.

• Drive in the correct gear. Use the highest gear possible without labouring the engine.

• Let the car slow gradually. Braking is a waste of energy. It can mean you’ve over accelerated, if you know you’re going to need to stop, then use your judgement and allow the car to slow down gradually.

• Be vigilant about your road position. You need to be constantly vigilant about your road position to really make these measures count.

Leave enough room to accelerate and move slowly. This can make a really big difference.

An easy way to think about this is imagine the car in front accelerating hard away from a traffic light only to need to soon brake sharply at the next. If you’re the car behind and slowly pull away and then slowly pull down, you’re right behind yet you’ve used much less fuel. When I first wrote about this on my website I was met by quite a bit of scepticism from some quarters.

Yet soon feedback came of big differences; one driver had gone an extra 100 miles on a single tank of petrol.

I’ve even once spent my holiday time testing these out. I was in South Africa with my long-suffering fianceeé, who put up with the fact that the sexiest car for me wasn’t a Ferrari or a Porsche but a supermini that had ... wow ... an automatic fuel gauge that allowed me to see how efficiently I was driving.

So I set out on an experiment. I'd drive from the hotel normally, but then return with my efficient driving head on (or vice-versa).

At the end of the holiday we'd travelled 500 miles and I’d recorded all the results (you see why I say long-suffering!).

For normal driving, I averaged 11.2 kilometres per litre, for efficient driving 13.4 kilometres per litre – an increase of 20%.

For someone who spends roughly £50 a week on fuel, that sort of saving adds up to £500 in a year. That's a serious saving.

Even more interestingly the low-fuel driving hadn’t made much difference to the journey length, only adding about 10 minutes over the whole time.

More info at www.moneysavingexpert.com/petrol

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