Fuel Prices Have Dropped. Yay, Let's Buy SUVs!

Here we go again, the price of petrol ("gas" if you don't know the difference between liquids and solids) has dropped back to the price it was a few years ago and people have already forgotten how much money they were forking out only a few short weeks ago to fill their tanks.

Autoblog Green tells us the sad tale of a manufacturer kicking their SUV/Truck manufacturing plants back up a notch in anticipation of increased demand after almost shutting them down over the past year and people who went through a car downsizing are now feeling buyer's remorse.

All price and environmental issues aside, oil is a fossil fuel and therefore a finite resource. Why go burning through something we'll still need in the foreseeable future for the production of plastics and the like when there are alternatives already available. All the people who were bitching and moaning about the price of petrol, imagine if you drove up to the bowser and there was no petrol at all.

Now I'm not a big fan of hybrids as they don't really solve the problem, they just make people who would have driven a medium sized car use the fuel of a small car or a more efficient car. Ultimately you'll still need to stop and fill up with fuel which is a chore and plug in electric cars are still a few years away from being in my garage.

So while I wait for my Holden Volt or Mitsubishi iMiEV I've been trying to drive more efficiently using some basic hypermiling techniques (apparently it's the word of the year for 2008) and tracking my success with Fuel Frog. My last fill up shows I averaged 7.7 litres per 100km, not too shabby, and that's basically from accelerating and braking slowly and coasting when possible.

While I was stoked to pay only $1.19 AUD per litre for my tank of dead dinosaurs I still hate having to stop for petrol. At the weekend we drove to Marysville which has a lot of trees and not much else for half the trip and I was thinking how screwed we'd be if we ran out of fuel out there.

And if that's not enough, now we have ninja kittens driving around on our roads!

While I'm on the topic, take a look at these car ads from the 1970s during the "energy crisis", look familiar?

Mercedes Going Super Green

Autoblog Green has a few interesting pieces of Mercedes news today. First there was the confirmation of an electric luxury vehicle from the three pointed star due out in 2010. Then we hear that Mercedes wants to totally eliminated the reliance on petroleum by 2015.

That sounds quite amazing but when you look closer you'll see that while they're planning not to release any more petrol powered cars they will be releasing biodiesel powered cars. Still, they have my full support... now go make me a car I can afford.

Fuel Prices A Steal

We all know fuel prices are on the up and up (I saw 168.5c/l today) and as humans are wont to do they take advantage of others misfortune to make a quick buck. This gent took it upon himself to build a large fuel tank (and I mean large) into the back of his truck and with that and a magic fuel bowser gauge disabling key went about stealing lots and lots of petrol.

Of course when others noticed this guy taking half an hour to fill his truck's tank they got a little suspicious.

British Petrol Prices Take A Pounding

Just why is it so many Australians want to go and work in England? The weather sucks, the food sucks and everything costs an arm and a leg. Well, now due to a strike by Shell tanker truck drivers you'll have to spend BOTH arms and legs to get a tank of petrol. The price at some Shell stations has gone up to £1.99 a litre, that's $4.12 AUD a litre or almost $15 USD a gallon. I thought I had it bad when it hit $1.65 a litre here.

FuelFrog Tells It Like It Is

FuelFrog is a simple website that allows you to enter data from each fill-up at the petrol (gas) station then displays your aggregated data. By providing the distance you've driven since the last fill-up, the current price and how much fuel you put in it can give you all sorts of interesting data like your average fuel consumption (I'm currently running at 8.8 litres per 100km or 0.27 MPG for you old school non-metricists).

One feature I've asked them to add is the ability to display how much it costs you to travel a certain distance. e.g. Using the data they've captured I figured it costs me $12.35 AUD to travel 100km (that's $11.68 USD per 62 miles or $18.84 USD per 100 miles)... and the bad news is it's only going to get worse. :(