When see things like this, I always think of the Chinese proverb
"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sure. Now imagine your car’s GPS knows you have 60 miles in the tank, and your journey is 300 miles. It can query the APO and figure out what the best petrol station to refuel on your journey is.
Driving somewhere to fill the tank 5p/l cheaper probably waste of time but unless all your trips are very short you usually can find a petrol station along a commute roue or along the route of a long leisure trip which is cheaper than one closest to your home. When you see prices in your navigator it's much easier to do.
Agreed. Most of the time the cost of driving out of your way exceeds the saving you would make. However, there's a fuel station near me that is 19.8% cheaper than one only 1.6 miles away from it, and that's a thing that is worth knowing.
As someone who waits until my tank is almost empty, to visit Costco one per month for a fill-up, despite it being 5 miles away, I understand your point.
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.
It would be really nice if say apple maps on my phone when connected to airplay could get the Fuel level in my car and distance to empty, and then when you plug in a route, and press add a gas station to my route, it picks the best one based on time out of the way, how much fuel you have left, and best relative price. ideally you could set your preferences in the app (e.g. never more than 5min out of the way, below median price if less than 1/8 tank, lowest quintile price if >1/8 tank etc.
Driving 40 minutes to save 5p might not be worth it. What does make more sense (at least where I live) is to go to the petrol station in the late afternoon or evening instead of the morning hours. The intraday price span on most regular fuels is usually 10 Euro cents per liter. Weekends also tend to be cheaper.
I've also wondered about whether to fully fill my tank or drive on a small amount so that I'm not using fuel to carry fuel. Do you know of any metrics on that?
I haven't made any calculations, and it's more a hunch, but considering you usually need to remove hundreds of KG in order to make an impact on how much fuel is being spent, 40-50L of gas (~40KG difference between full and empty maybe?) would have an marginal effect on how much fuel is spent to carry a full tank vs 10% filled tank.
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.
> 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.
The main issue is that it risks pulling detritus from the very bottom of the fuel tank, usually a bigger issue in diesels and I suspect less of a problem these days.
Yeah, fair enough, I think what he mentioned though, wasn't just about fuel going through the pump being used as coolant, but some extra process that only happens when you're not running below say 10% or whatever, an extra cooling process that only runs when you're not low on fuel. Maybe I misunderstood him though and it's just about the liquid passing through.
I think the fuel passing through is the only method that could be used to cool, the volume of fuel required is presumably constant, regardless of how much fuel you have left, so the amount passing through the pump should be the same until you run out.
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.
If your priority is the journey to fill a car with fuel and time spent doing so, surely just buy a Battery Electric Vehicle and then this problem evaporates because it just plugs in like every other appliance you own rather than needing a trip to a fuel station.
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.
That's an extreme case though, and not what this sort of thing is aimed at.
Here in Perth, Western Australia, it's common for pump prices to vary significantly even within a small radius. But they're all on https://www.fuelwatch.wa.gov.au/ so you can see what the price is ahead of time.
If it's 14c cheaper per litre (coming up for 10%) to go 500m one direction vs 500m another direction, which one are you going to choose?
The typical use case is probably much more like deciding which station within half a mile of home is cheapest, and that could easily be a variance of 5p or more.
Decisions about fuel purchases are often irrational, much like many food purchases or generic medicines.
I know someone who avoids their local petrol station that is 10p/litre cheaper than most others nearby (within a mile or so) as they think the cheaper fuel must be lower quality. There are weird status things going on with purchases like this.
Only the other day my father refused to buy some branded paracetamol because it was ~5 times more expensive than the local pharmacy brand that was out of stock. (£2.25 vs £0.49 for 16 500mg tablets.) I'd usually agree with him but he was out of paracetamol and has been advised by his doctor to take 2x500mg a day and there was no viable nearby alternative.
A digression but for that generation (those born in 1940s/50s) that grew up with rationing I think it is hardwired into their brain to try and minimise the cost of so many things, but with lots of random exceptions. Later on that day he ordered an extra drink but decided he was too full once it had arrived so he left it. So he was worried about spending an extra £1.76 on paracetamol but not about spending £7 on a pint he didn't drink.
Many people decide what petrol station to use based on simply how close it is, what kind of shop is attached to it (and the bits of British snobbery around that), whether it also sells whatever else they want (bread, milk, beer, etc), or even whether it is easy to drive in and out of.
I put in £3 worth of fuel the other day but that's because it was a rental car that I had to return with the same fuel level as at pickup and I'd only done ~30 miles with lots of stop/start. (I would have used a Zipcar/Zipvan but they've all gone now.) I would have tried to put in less but UK fuel pumps usually mandate a minimum of 2 litres which is not far off £3 at current prices.
Out of curiosity how does that work (never been in a situation where I have to worry about minimal fuel purchases) - does the pump simply round up the price to the minimum when done, or did you actually have to dispense extra fuel, either into a jerrycan or donating it to someone else's car otherwise the pump would not actually finalize the transaction?
It's mandated by a sticker saying so. I don't think it's ever enforced.
A google seems to show that it is because the pumps are not certified to be accurate below 2 litres (or 5 litres for higher flow rate pumps like the HGV diesel pumps) so anything below this is at your own risk.
Another way of thinking about it is you have no right to complain if you think you've been short fueled if you don't dispense the minimum stated.
Yes but the real feature that makes it viable, is that petrol station in France can change price only once a day.
I forgot how it works in the UK, but in Germany they change wildly depending on the hour in the day. For example they show low price in the morning, so that workers who are late for work notice it and fill on the way back, only to find a price 10-20cents higher at 17h.
I don't see how that makes it uniquely viable in France. Germany has something very much like this too. And we've had it for nearly 13 years.
> Since 31 August 2013 companies which operate public petrol stations or have the power to set their prices are required to report price changes for the most commonly used types of fuel, i.e. Super E5, Super E10 and Diesel “in real time” to the Market Transparency Unit for Fuels. This then passes on the incoming price data to consumer information service providers, which in turn pass it on to the consumer.
As a consumer, there is no direct API by the MTS-K that you can use, but there are some services like Tankerkoenig which pass this data on to you. I have used their API in Home Assistant before I switched to an EV.
We have a system here in Western Australia and people use it a lot: fuelwatch.wa.gov.au
I think it's exactly that, the UK has never had this so people there either choose by brand or just convenience. But since moving to WA I've found that it's really easy to have a quick look when I notice I need to fill up, then I can head to the cheapest station nearby, and the difference can be in the range of 10-15%, occasionally 20%.
In a country where fuel is as expensive as it is in the UK, people are going to use that.
> I think it's exactly that, the UK has never had this so people there either choose by brand or just convenience.
We've had it for years (as noted in other comments there's a few different people like the RAC, AA and Petrolprices.com all maintaining their own lists - a quick check of my email has messages from the latter going back to 2011). The new part is that this is from the government and the data is freely accessible (Petrolprices in particular covered their pages in ads, so I'd be surprised if there wasn't a way to exchange money for the data).
The context to this is that, especially since the pandemic, there's been a complaint with the Competition and Markets Authority that the petrol stations were quick to raise prices, slow to lower them, and weren't competing with each other[1]:
> The CMA found that retail prices tended to "rise like a rocket, but fall like a feather" in response to increases or decreases in the cost of crude oil.
Independent petrol stations have virtually disappeared and you don't have to look too hard to see that in an area they tend to all raise or lower their prices in virtual lockstep. Gathering this data would make the case significantly easier if the next step were that some of the petrol station operators had to be broken up to encourage more competition.
But how accurate was the data on those older apps?
Petrolprices.com (for example) seems to have been built on user-reported data rather than petrol-station reported data, and it's easy to find fairly recent criticisms of the whole thing being inaccurate. And an inaccurate comparison site is fairly useless IMHO.
I lived in the UK until 2021 and I must admit I'd never heard of them. Whereas here in WA everyone uses fuelprices. There are probably other factors involved here as well, as we have a weird weekly or biweekly price cycle (though I think this has ended somewhat in the last two years) where every second Tuesday fuel was dirt cheap as they were trying to clear down the tanks ahead of the next delivery.
Is the 'new part' not that the vendors are being forced to actually publish comparison data rather than rely on third parties to gather it?
Other than a time lag (and petrol prices don't generally change often enough to matter IME), I can't say I ever noticed any of them being that inaccurate.
myAutomate (the owners of Petrolprices.com) talk about having "over 60 years combined expertise in the fuel industry", so I suppose I'd be surprised if it's all crowdsourced data - they've probably made arrangements with at least the big players, in which case the forced publication is much of a muchness?
>the UK has never had this so people there either choose by brand or just convenience
Disagree - drivers maintain a mental map of local stations and know roughly how expensive they are, and make a decision based on that. Obviously this API will help inform us better!
I think you’re overstating the effect. The most volume is sold at supermarkets which have the best location for throughout but they also have the cheapest prices.
>> I know someone who avoids their local petrol station that is 10p/litre cheaper than most others nearby (within a mile or so) as they think the cheaper fuel must be lower quality
- "Top Tier gas contains higher detergent levels to prevent engine carbon"
- "Major brands use specific additives that enhance performance, while "no-name" or discount stations might only meet the minimum EPA-required detergent levels"
- "The condition of a station's underground storage tanks affects quality"
- "For the best engine performance and longevity, choosing Top Tier-certified gasoline is generally recommended."
You don't. And, for similar reasoning you don't know the more expensive fuel is "better" quality.
More importantly you know that pretty much any fuel being sold in a mainstream place in the UK is going to meet the minimum national standards which are perfectly fine for the vast majority of cars on the road.
Anyone that has a car that requires E5 rather than E10, or higher octane fuel may need to buy the associated "premium" fuels, but these are just not necessary for the vast majority of cars on the road. But we're not talking about the premium fuels here, we're talking about two garages selling pretty much the same thing for quite different prices and preying on some people's FUD.
In India, we have generic medicine paracetamol for 20 bucks while branded one is like 5-10 times that.
Sadly many people feel that because they are sick, they need to spend as much money as possible because that would give them best shot at getting healthly.
I once asked a guy "why don't you buy that cheap medicine. Its the same and will save you money" but they were like "naa. Its cheap. What would be inside it. I need to pay top money for best medicine"
Having seen what happens with bad gas from shoddy stations, i too will bypass many in favor of the big names. I know someone who got water instead of gas when a tiny mom-and-pop gas station let thier tank run so low it started pumping decades of groundwater from the bottom of a rarely-serviced tank.
Just google "gas station pumped water" to see all the local news articles about this sort of thing.
None of these are local news articles, in fact they are all from a different continent.
A local article that I did find was from a BP petrol station in Liverpool, so I'm not sure this can be isolated to 'mom-and-pop' outfits (something we don't really have over here anyway).
This is exactly the sort of thing a government should be doing in a free market. Fair access to pricing information is essential to the operation of a free market. Now do this for all EV charging stations.
Ha! If you look into that you’ll find they tried and then the “free service” was somehow insidiously overtaken by private companies with vested interests in listing their own charge points.
I guess the question is how will it be enforced and what would the penalties be for reporting inaccurate or outdated data?
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.
Last year there was a study done in Germany. The gas station prices change an average of 14 times a day. This really shocked me. I wonder if this is normal practice most other places.
How does it affect things across the economy for fuel purchase? Haven't seen a study. It would incentive-ise price cutting to increase sales, especially by the independent operators, by essentially advertising the lower pricing for free, is my guess.
This is great news. There's been a pilot study in which each retailer (voluntarily) hosted a JSON file containing their current prices (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/access-fuel-price-data). I noticed recently that a few of them had been removed/stopped working.
Neither the pilot nor the current API appears to include all fuel stations, but at least they provide (hopefully) more reliable updates from the ones that do.
A quick play with the API, the information responses (opening times, addresses etc.) doesn't appear to be working, I just get a 500 (HTML not JSON) response. But the price calls are working, and I'm glad this is being pushed forward post-pilot.
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.
It’s a delight even to have a regulated source of all fuel station locations in the uk!
This might be a slight missing woods/trees moment but that aside - there is precious little open geospatial data in the uk that establishes see this dot here? That’s a fuel station, that is. That dot there? Oooooh no, that there’s a pub.
The uk govts of the time managed to hand both the address data and the this-is-what-it-is data off to separate commercial enterprises in the name of privatisation, and I genuinely believe it was by accident as it’s… err… quite a niche topic of knowledge.
So anything - anything! - that brings some of that back and truly open to the public is very much welcomed.
This is a great innovation and I'm sure in time it'll become a useful source of information. There are some edge cases of course.
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.
You need a mix of price, availability and trust. I just head for the nearest Sainsbury’s. They have. Reputation to protect, I can do my shopping at the same time and their prices are competitive. I just wouldn’t go to the cheapest place unless it was a hire car.
That's often out of date, and the UI is pretty buggy (at least on iOS).
There's also 'Gaspy' which is really a NZ app that was very popular in NZ (I used to live there) where people submit and confirm prices, but in the UK there aren't that many users (hasn't got critical mass), so there are often no prices or things are very out-of-date.
What are the price variations like over short distances?
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.
I think my favourite in the UK is the town I grew up in, where the cheapest petrol station is 100 yards down the two lane road from a more expensive one, so you could actually see the cheaper prices from the forecourt of the more expensive one...
I spent the last few hours hacking together PetrolMate using this dataset: https://petrolmate.co.uk
A couple of interesting observations while building it:
Yesterday the dataset had ~600 stations. Today it’s reporting 6,666 stations from the UK government feed, which is… a slightly ominous number, but according to the data and me asking an LLM, that’s close to full UK coverage already.
I deliberately went for a “pure speed” tech stack. Astro, no UI framework, just vanilla JS. Deployed on Cloudflare, with prices stored in D1.
I'm not using the API to load the data, I'm cleansing and then importing the CSV (which you can download for free) into the D1 database.
Really nice to finally have an official, open dataset to build on. It already feels far more reliable than the old user-reported approaches, and it’ll be interesting to see how coverage and update frequency settles over the next few weeks.
Would love to hear feedback by the way. What is this missing to make it a genuinely useful tool?
Thanks for putting this together!
Couple QoL features I'd love to see:
1. filter slider, decreasing on price, to see places closest to me disappearing
2. on the left panel, when I click on a low priced area, it should highlight it on the map, so I know where it is. The 'go to pump' button, I guess is good. but I'd only want to commit to gmaps if I already know that it's a reasonable place for me to. be going.
Anyone able to use the API? The CSV link is dead and I cant get the API to authenticate. The Beta flag doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but I love the idea!
I am mainly referring to the apps which hold a database of chargers, not the shitty ones which are used to take payment. Thankfully it seems like more of them are switching to contactless payments.
This is great news. There used to be a handy email newsletter that did this, but then when everything became "apps" the newsletter disappeared in favour of an app, which then became a premium paid service only.
It's missing closing the circle with one of the users of the premium paid only service to start their own newsletter because they got tired of the paid product. It's only a matter of time.
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.
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.
The variation in even a couple of miles can be pretty big. I almost never go out of my way to visit a cheaper petrol station because that's usually a false economy, but there are definitely some local places that I favour or avoid because they're almost always cheaper/more expensive than the surrounding ones.
Strange that google maps still doesn't show fuel prices in the UK. Google maps show fuel prices the US so this feature was implemented and it should be easy to show prices in the UK using the same data source was Waze.
I had to give up Waze over xmas because it refused to give me the 1 hour, straight down the motorway route, and instead tried to send me a bizarre route that would take 2.5 hours. Switched to Apple Maps and haven't gone back, though I do miss the fact that Waze shows you your current speed.
Why is the government doing this, this seems like a ridiculous waste.
Here in Germany private corporations provide APIs for this. Google maps straight up tells you the price at nearby stations.
Maybe the UK government should focus on things such as their crumbling infrastructure, their almost non existent GDP growth or getting rid of their knife murderer and rapist population?
More unnecessary meddling, this causes price convergence so anyone living close to a typically lower cost source of fuel is going to have an almost imperceptible increase in relative cost.
They certainly love spending taxpayer money on nothing don't they.
In the above model prices converge on a mean, reducing the potential savings for those that price really matters (the poor are the ones most likely to check existing price discovery sites), thus it's regressive - the government are either seeing it as an opportunity to marginally increase tax rake, or more likely are oblivious to the externality of the poor bearing the burden.
That's... not how markets work. The cheap petrol stations are very much aware that they're cheaper than their neighbours already. The more expensive ones may feel some downward pressure, but mostly won't.
People who are price sensitive can discover cheaper alternatives more easily; others still won't bother
Which model? Tested how? Are the poor the most likely to check existing sites?
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...
We don't assume perfect information, or rather - it exists already in an unsanctioned form for those that seek it (usually those to whom price is sensitive).
Until this we assume marginality holds true and price dispersion has a benefit in society that we unwittingly enable.
When see things like this, I always think of the Chinese proverb
"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
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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!
Sure. Now imagine your car’s GPS knows you have 60 miles in the tank, and your journey is 300 miles. It can query the APO and figure out what the best petrol station to refuel on your journey is.
More information is always good.
Driving somewhere to fill the tank 5p/l cheaper probably waste of time but unless all your trips are very short you usually can find a petrol station along a commute roue or along the route of a long leisure trip which is cheaper than one closest to your home. When you see prices in your navigator it's much easier to do.
Agreed. Most of the time the cost of driving out of your way exceeds the saving you would make. However, there's a fuel station near me that is 19.8% cheaper than one only 1.6 miles away from it, and that's a thing that is worth knowing.
https://xkcd.com/951/
As someone who waits until my tank is almost empty, to visit Costco one per month for a fill-up, despite it being 5 miles away, I understand your point.
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.
It would be really nice if say apple maps on my phone when connected to airplay could get the Fuel level in my car and distance to empty, and then when you plug in a route, and press add a gas station to my route, it picks the best one based on time out of the way, how much fuel you have left, and best relative price. ideally you could set your preferences in the app (e.g. never more than 5min out of the way, below median price if less than 1/8 tank, lowest quintile price if >1/8 tank etc.
Driving 40 minutes to save 5p might not be worth it. What does make more sense (at least where I live) is to go to the petrol station in the late afternoon or evening instead of the morning hours. The intraday price span on most regular fuels is usually 10 Euro cents per liter. Weekends also tend to be cheaper.
>so as the saying goes... which would you prefer £1,275 saving or 62.5 days of time
Just want to say, nothing wrong with doing that. Everyone has different priorities. I just hope most wont have to do it.
I've also wondered about whether to fully fill my tank or drive on a small amount so that I'm not using fuel to carry fuel. Do you know of any metrics on that?
I haven't made any calculations, and it's more a hunch, but considering you usually need to remove hundreds of KG in order to make an impact on how much fuel is being spent, 40-50L of gas (~40KG difference between full and empty maybe?) would have an marginal effect on how much fuel is spent to carry a full tank vs 10% filled tank.
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.
> 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.
The main issue is that it risks pulling detritus from the very bottom of the fuel tank, usually a bigger issue in diesels and I suspect less of a problem these days.
Aah, I have a diesel car, maybe that was what he was alluding to! Car is from 2017 so not that old. Thanks :)
> doesn't the fuel pump use fuel itself as a coolant or something
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.
Yeah, fair enough, I think what he mentioned though, wasn't just about fuel going through the pump being used as coolant, but some extra process that only happens when you're not running below say 10% or whatever, an extra cooling process that only runs when you're not low on fuel. Maybe I misunderstood him though and it's just about the liquid passing through.
I think the fuel passing through is the only method that could be used to cool, the volume of fuel required is presumably constant, regardless of how much fuel you have left, so the amount passing through the pump should be the same until you run out.
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.
you can probably work it out but you have to make a lot of assumptions :)
Ultimately how much is your time worth? in the example given drcongo's time is worth £1.28 an hour.
Unless you're driving a lorry with a 120L tank, it's negligible. We're talking like, 100 mL per 100km.
It can be more complex than that, sure for one person your comment makes sense
but if enough people use their time to go to the cheaper station further away, then they may force the closer garage to to reduce their price
either that or the close garage goes out of business and the one further away puts up the price because they can.
but still, it can be more complex
This is like saying that selling enough volume might make up for losing money on every unit. It's only complex until you do the math
Once I had a boss who said: "Availability beats Pricing, always"
If your priority is the journey to fill a car with fuel and time spent doing so, surely just buy a Battery Electric Vehicle and then this problem evaporates because it just plugs in like every other appliance you own rather than needing a trip to a fuel station.
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.
That's an extreme case though, and not what this sort of thing is aimed at.
Here in Perth, Western Australia, it's common for pump prices to vary significantly even within a small radius. But they're all on https://www.fuelwatch.wa.gov.au/ so you can see what the price is ahead of time.
If it's 14c cheaper per litre (coming up for 10%) to go 500m one direction vs 500m another direction, which one are you going to choose?
The typical use case is probably much more like deciding which station within half a mile of home is cheapest, and that could easily be a variance of 5p or more.
Well that saved me from trying to work it out, thanks!
edit: My annual milage is actually very low, so it definitely wouldn't be worth it, but I appreciated the maths either way.
You didn't factor in the amount of taxpayer money spent on creating the website and the ongoing costs of running it.
Decisions about fuel purchases are often irrational, much like many food purchases or generic medicines.
I know someone who avoids their local petrol station that is 10p/litre cheaper than most others nearby (within a mile or so) as they think the cheaper fuel must be lower quality. There are weird status things going on with purchases like this.
Only the other day my father refused to buy some branded paracetamol because it was ~5 times more expensive than the local pharmacy brand that was out of stock. (£2.25 vs £0.49 for 16 500mg tablets.) I'd usually agree with him but he was out of paracetamol and has been advised by his doctor to take 2x500mg a day and there was no viable nearby alternative.
A digression but for that generation (those born in 1940s/50s) that grew up with rationing I think it is hardwired into their brain to try and minimise the cost of so many things, but with lots of random exceptions. Later on that day he ordered an extra drink but decided he was too full once it had arrived so he left it. So he was worried about spending an extra £1.76 on paracetamol but not about spending £7 on a pint he didn't drink.
Many people decide what petrol station to use based on simply how close it is, what kind of shop is attached to it (and the bits of British snobbery around that), whether it also sells whatever else they want (bread, milk, beer, etc), or even whether it is easy to drive in and out of.
On the topic of fuel, it's funny when people only put in £10 worth of fuel a time.
You spend more in by fuel driving there more often. As well as wasting your own time.
Operating on such a tight budget is more common than you might think and they could have been hit with a surprise bill that's pushed them into debt.
I put in £3 worth of fuel the other day but that's because it was a rental car that I had to return with the same fuel level as at pickup and I'd only done ~30 miles with lots of stop/start. (I would have used a Zipcar/Zipvan but they've all gone now.) I would have tried to put in less but UK fuel pumps usually mandate a minimum of 2 litres which is not far off £3 at current prices.
> usually mandate a minimum of 2 litres
Out of curiosity how does that work (never been in a situation where I have to worry about minimal fuel purchases) - does the pump simply round up the price to the minimum when done, or did you actually have to dispense extra fuel, either into a jerrycan or donating it to someone else's car otherwise the pump would not actually finalize the transaction?
It's mandated by a sticker saying so. I don't think it's ever enforced.
A google seems to show that it is because the pumps are not certified to be accurate below 2 litres (or 5 litres for higher flow rate pumps like the HGV diesel pumps) so anything below this is at your own risk.
Another way of thinking about it is you have no right to complain if you think you've been short fueled if you don't dispense the minimum stated.
In France we had such api available for decades, many apps are using it and there are a lot of people using them.
I don't know if your experience is from British people but it looks like they just didn't have the mean to effectively compare fuel prices.
Once they do, there is a significant part of the British drivers that will most likely be using it.
Yes but the real feature that makes it viable, is that petrol station in France can change price only once a day. I forgot how it works in the UK, but in Germany they change wildly depending on the hour in the day. For example they show low price in the morning, so that workers who are late for work notice it and fill on the way back, only to find a price 10-20cents higher at 17h.
I don't see how that makes it uniquely viable in France. Germany has something very much like this too. And we've had it for nearly 13 years.
> Since 31 August 2013 companies which operate public petrol stations or have the power to set their prices are required to report price changes for the most commonly used types of fuel, i.e. Super E5, Super E10 and Diesel “in real time” to the Market Transparency Unit for Fuels. This then passes on the incoming price data to consumer information service providers, which in turn pass it on to the consumer.
As a consumer, there is no direct API by the MTS-K that you can use, but there are some services like Tankerkoenig which pass this data on to you. I have used their API in Home Assistant before I switched to an EV.
https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/EN/Tasks/markettransparencyu...
This is exactly it.
We have a system here in Western Australia and people use it a lot: fuelwatch.wa.gov.au
I think it's exactly that, the UK has never had this so people there either choose by brand or just convenience. But since moving to WA I've found that it's really easy to have a quick look when I notice I need to fill up, then I can head to the cheapest station nearby, and the difference can be in the range of 10-15%, occasionally 20%.
In a country where fuel is as expensive as it is in the UK, people are going to use that.
> I think it's exactly that, the UK has never had this so people there either choose by brand or just convenience.
We've had it for years (as noted in other comments there's a few different people like the RAC, AA and Petrolprices.com all maintaining their own lists - a quick check of my email has messages from the latter going back to 2011). The new part is that this is from the government and the data is freely accessible (Petrolprices in particular covered their pages in ads, so I'd be surprised if there wasn't a way to exchange money for the data).
The context to this is that, especially since the pandemic, there's been a complaint with the Competition and Markets Authority that the petrol stations were quick to raise prices, slow to lower them, and weren't competing with each other[1]:
> The CMA found that retail prices tended to "rise like a rocket, but fall like a feather" in response to increases or decreases in the cost of crude oil.
Independent petrol stations have virtually disappeared and you don't have to look too hard to see that in an area they tend to all raise or lower their prices in virtual lockstep. Gathering this data would make the case significantly easier if the next step were that some of the petrol station operators had to be broken up to encourage more competition.
1: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp80dpzdg37o#comments
Edit: Petrolprices was founded in 2005 (!) [2]
2: https://www.myautomateapp.co.uk/
But how accurate was the data on those older apps?
Petrolprices.com (for example) seems to have been built on user-reported data rather than petrol-station reported data, and it's easy to find fairly recent criticisms of the whole thing being inaccurate. And an inaccurate comparison site is fairly useless IMHO.
I lived in the UK until 2021 and I must admit I'd never heard of them. Whereas here in WA everyone uses fuelprices. There are probably other factors involved here as well, as we have a weird weekly or biweekly price cycle (though I think this has ended somewhat in the last two years) where every second Tuesday fuel was dirt cheap as they were trying to clear down the tanks ahead of the next delivery.
Is the 'new part' not that the vendors are being forced to actually publish comparison data rather than rely on third parties to gather it?
Other than a time lag (and petrol prices don't generally change often enough to matter IME), I can't say I ever noticed any of them being that inaccurate.
myAutomate (the owners of Petrolprices.com) talk about having "over 60 years combined expertise in the fuel industry", so I suppose I'd be surprised if it's all crowdsourced data - they've probably made arrangements with at least the big players, in which case the forced publication is much of a muchness?
>the UK has never had this so people there either choose by brand or just convenience
Disagree - drivers maintain a mental map of local stations and know roughly how expensive they are, and make a decision based on that. Obviously this API will help inform us better!
I never did in 25 years of driving in the UK. "Need petrol buy petrol, try to avoid doing that on the motorway".
Maybe it's me that's weird. No, surely that can't be right... :)
> I never did in 25 years of driving in the UK. "Need petrol buy petrol, try to avoid doing that on the motorway".
Same here.
Sometimes even on the A413...
Since paracetamol interacts with alcohol,there may be more rationality than first thought!
Not really, he was advised to take it daily by his doctor and his doctor knows his drinking habits.
UK advice is to avoid drinking more than 14 units (think a shot, a small beer or a small glass of wine = 1 unit) whilst taking paracetamol.
https://www.nhs.uk/medicines/paracetamol-for-adults/common-q...
I think you’re overstating the effect. The most volume is sold at supermarkets which have the best location for throughout but they also have the cheapest prices.
>> I know someone who avoids their local petrol station that is 10p/litre cheaper than most others nearby (within a mile or so) as they think the cheaper fuel must be lower quality
- "Top Tier gas contains higher detergent levels to prevent engine carbon"
- "Major brands use specific additives that enhance performance, while "no-name" or discount stations might only meet the minimum EPA-required detergent levels"
- "The condition of a station's underground storage tanks affects quality"
- "For the best engine performance and longevity, choosing Top Tier-certified gasoline is generally recommended."
These things are not true in the UK - all fuel is held to the same high standard, though premium variants are available too.
So no petrol is permitted to be higher quality (for the same octane rating)?
ie you're asserting there is zero variance in quality?
OP wrote lower quality, not low quality
By "lower quality" I did mean "low quality".
It's the reverse of "this one is more expensive therefore it must be better" without any evidence at all that it is the case.
How do you know the fuel is the same quality. Did you actually make a hydrocarbon profile?
You don't. And, for similar reasoning you don't know the more expensive fuel is "better" quality.
More importantly you know that pretty much any fuel being sold in a mainstream place in the UK is going to meet the minimum national standards which are perfectly fine for the vast majority of cars on the road.
Anyone that has a car that requires E5 rather than E10, or higher octane fuel may need to buy the associated "premium" fuels, but these are just not necessary for the vast majority of cars on the road. But we're not talking about the premium fuels here, we're talking about two garages selling pretty much the same thing for quite different prices and preying on some people's FUD.
In India, we have generic medicine paracetamol for 20 bucks while branded one is like 5-10 times that.
Sadly many people feel that because they are sick, they need to spend as much money as possible because that would give them best shot at getting healthly.
I once asked a guy "why don't you buy that cheap medicine. Its the same and will save you money" but they were like "naa. Its cheap. What would be inside it. I need to pay top money for best medicine"
Having seen what happens with bad gas from shoddy stations, i too will bypass many in favor of the big names. I know someone who got water instead of gas when a tiny mom-and-pop gas station let thier tank run so low it started pumping decades of groundwater from the bottom of a rarely-serviced tank.
Just google "gas station pumped water" to see all the local news articles about this sort of thing.
https://www.koco.com/article/drivers-oklahoma-furious-after-...
https://www.motorbiscuit.com/gas-station-pumps-ga-water/
https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/local/lake-county/mentor-w...
https://www.motorbiscuit.com/nevada-gas-station-pumps-golden...
None of these are local news articles, in fact they are all from a different continent.
A local article that I did find was from a BP petrol station in Liverpool, so I'm not sure this can be isolated to 'mom-and-pop' outfits (something we don't really have over here anyway).
https://www.petrolprices.com/news/garage-sells-petrol-dilute...
This is exactly the sort of thing a government should be doing in a free market. Fair access to pricing information is essential to the operation of a free market. Now do this for all EV charging stations.
Ha! If you look into that you’ll find they tried and then the “free service” was somehow insidiously overtaken by private companies with vested interests in listing their own charge points.
Encouraging car use is exactly the sort of things governments should not be doing!!!
This is not encouraging car use
We've had fuelwatch here in W.Australia for 30(?) ish years now (used to be a telnet file IIRC)
https://www.fuelwatch.wa.gov.au/
Nice to see the UK come onboard.
> From 2 February 2026, you must submit fuel price updates within 30 minutes of any change.
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
> So looks as though the requirement to report was only just introduced
Yeah. It was formally announced in the November 2025 budget and launched today.
I guess the question is how will it be enforced and what would the penalties be for reporting inaccurate or outdated data?
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.
Some vague info here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fuel-finder-enfor...
Thanks.
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.
Last year there was a study done in Germany. The gas station prices change an average of 14 times a day. This really shocked me. I wonder if this is normal practice most other places.
It's 22 times a day, according to the Federal Cartel Office.
https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/DE/Aufgaben/Markttransparenz...
Here in western Australia, they must publish the price for the day by 2pm the day before, and cannot change it.
Definitely very different.
This sort of thing works well for individuals. Eg.
https://www.fuelcheck.nsw.gov.au/app/FuelPrice/ByLocation?la...
Then you need the integration into home assistant for your local options.
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/nsw_fuel_station/
And an app for ease of use when you're out of your local area.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=au.gov.nsw.one...
https://apps.apple.com/au/app/nsw-fuelcheck/id1266569551
How does it affect things across the economy for fuel purchase? Haven't seen a study. It would incentive-ise price cutting to increase sales, especially by the independent operators, by essentially advertising the lower pricing for free, is my guess.
This is great news. There's been a pilot study in which each retailer (voluntarily) hosted a JSON file containing their current prices (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/access-fuel-price-data). I noticed recently that a few of them had been removed/stopped working.
Neither the pilot nor the current API appears to include all fuel stations, but at least they provide (hopefully) more reliable updates from the ones that do.
I'd been playing with the pilot study data and set up FuelBelly to aggregate and compare https://fuelbelly.com/explore?lat=51.50740713124398&lng=-0.1.... (doesn't include the API updates, yet...)
A quick play with the API, the information responses (opening times, addresses etc.) doesn't appear to be working, I just get a 500 (HTML not JSON) response. But the price calls are working, and I'm glad this is being pushed forward post-pilot.
More information on the API schema from here:
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.
Created a quick map dashboard that shows the prices on a map with pins:
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.
It’s a delight even to have a regulated source of all fuel station locations in the uk!
This might be a slight missing woods/trees moment but that aside - there is precious little open geospatial data in the uk that establishes see this dot here? That’s a fuel station, that is. That dot there? Oooooh no, that there’s a pub.
The uk govts of the time managed to hand both the address data and the this-is-what-it-is data off to separate commercial enterprises in the name of privatisation, and I genuinely believe it was by accident as it’s… err… quite a niche topic of knowledge.
So anything - anything! - that brings some of that back and truly open to the public is very much welcomed.
This is a great innovation and I'm sure in time it'll become a useful source of information. There are some edge cases of course.
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...
Good to see. For what it's worth, data were previously available from the Competition and Markets authority, used by https://localfuelprices.co.uk/
You need a mix of price, availability and trust. I just head for the nearest Sainsbury’s. They have. Reputation to protect, I can do my shopping at the same time and their prices are competitive. I just wouldn’t go to the cheapest place unless it was a hire car.
There is an app called 'PetrolPrices' which seems to have a pretty complete price database. It's much better than this government API so far.
That's often out of date, and the UI is pretty buggy (at least on iOS).
There's also 'Gaspy' which is really a NZ app that was very popular in NZ (I used to live there) where people submit and confirm prices, but in the UK there aren't that many users (hasn't got critical mass), so there are often no prices or things are very out-of-date.
I’ve used that app for some time but unfortunately it relies on user reporting, and the prices can be days or weeks out of date.
The AA also show prices through their app.
What are the price variations like over short distances?
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.
I think my favourite in the UK is the town I grew up in, where the cheapest petrol station is 100 yards down the two lane road from a more expensive one, so you could actually see the cheaper prices from the forecourt of the more expensive one...
Also, don't buy 89 or 91 if your car doesn't require it. My previous car said: 91, at a minimum 89.
Current car says: 93, at a minimum 91. I don't have 93 here. So 91 it is.
But going the other way is just wasteful.
I spent the last few hours hacking together PetrolMate using this dataset: https://petrolmate.co.uk
A couple of interesting observations while building it:
Yesterday the dataset had ~600 stations. Today it’s reporting 6,666 stations from the UK government feed, which is… a slightly ominous number, but according to the data and me asking an LLM, that’s close to full UK coverage already.
I deliberately went for a “pure speed” tech stack. Astro, no UI framework, just vanilla JS. Deployed on Cloudflare, with prices stored in D1.
I'm not using the API to load the data, I'm cleansing and then importing the CSV (which you can download for free) into the D1 database.
There’s also an /insights page with some aggregated stats that genuinely surprised me: https://petrolmate.co.uk/insights
Really nice to finally have an official, open dataset to build on. It already feels far more reliable than the old user-reported approaches, and it’ll be interesting to see how coverage and update frequency settles over the next few weeks.
Would love to hear feedback by the way. What is this missing to make it a genuinely useful tool?
Thanks for putting this together! Couple QoL features I'd love to see:
1. filter slider, decreasing on price, to see places closest to me disappearing 2. on the left panel, when I click on a low priced area, it should highlight it on the map, so I know where it is. The 'go to pump' button, I guess is good. but I'd only want to commit to gmaps if I already know that it's a reasonable place for me to. be going.
Anyone able to use the API? The CSV link is dead and I cant get the API to authenticate. The Beta flag doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but I love the idea!
I wonder if the CSV is supposed to list all petrol stations, as currently it only has 4 with city==Edinburgh.
Edit: after asking AI about this I would say the CSV is pretty useless as a comprehensive source of info on UK fuel prices.
It’s only just been launched. AI isn’t a great way to find out about brand new things.
Apparently although it is a requirement to upload data from today, there's an effective grace period of 3 months (sorry - got that from AI).
> after asking AI about this
Seriously?
I thought HN readers would have more sense than that.
The api seems very unstable (or it might just be me) keeps timing out when I try to fetch.
Is anyone else getting a 403 from this URL?
yes - assuming it is geoblocking
Yep - out of the country right now and get the same. VPN back home and it’s working. A bit annoying
This is neat, great use of public data, and just in time for the ICE phaseout starting within a decade.
(a) that phase out is going to take an extra-ordinarily long time. and (b) it'll be pretty trivial to extend this to charging networks.
Set's an good precedent for places that offer electric charging having to do the same thing in future though.
These are usually already available on the various charging apps and maps, especially because it can vary by a lot.
Charging apps suck. Why can't charging work just like gas? Tap a card and you're done.
I am mainly referring to the apps which hold a database of chargers, not the shitty ones which are used to take payment. Thankfully it seems like more of them are switching to contactless payments.
Bit better than the original trial of "stick a JSON file somewhere on your website" - neat.
Needs a solver for cost that takes fuel needed, distance to station, fuel economy, and value of the drivers time.
This is great news. There used to be a handy email newsletter that did this, but then when everything became "apps" the newsletter disappeared in favour of an app, which then became a premium paid service only.
It's missing closing the circle with one of the users of the premium paid only service to start their own newsletter because they got tired of the paid product. It's only a matter of time.
See also: UK-fuel-price-map: A web UI for the UK fuel price data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46857520
(no comments there yet though!)
They have a REST API for the stations... Great.
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.
According to this webpage you can do it by phone: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/report-your-fuel-prices-and-fore...
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.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/report-your-fuel-prices-and-fore... does have a Web interface for updating prices.
The CSV file has only 650 rows.
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.
The variation in even a couple of miles can be pretty big. I almost never go out of my way to visit a cheaper petrol station because that's usually a false economy, but there are definitely some local places that I favour or avoid because they're almost always cheaper/more expensive than the surrounding ones.
as much as I try to stay away from Google products: waze shows this on the usual driving map quite well
Strange that google maps still doesn't show fuel prices in the UK. Google maps show fuel prices the US so this feature was implemented and it should be easy to show prices in the UK using the same data source was Waze.
I had to give up Waze over xmas because it refused to give me the 1 hour, straight down the motorway route, and instead tried to send me a bizarre route that would take 2.5 hours. Switched to Apple Maps and haven't gone back, though I do miss the fact that Waze shows you your current speed.
> though I do miss the fact that Waze shows you your current speed.
this is the only reason I use waze!
I feel like I’m missing something here - presumably your vehicle has a speedometer? What does the Waze speed dial give you over this?
Unless you mean that it has the speed limit too, if so I agree that it’s a must have, along with the speed camera alerts.
Why is the government doing this, this seems like a ridiculous waste.
Here in Germany private corporations provide APIs for this. Google maps straight up tells you the price at nearby stations.
Maybe the UK government should focus on things such as their crumbling infrastructure, their almost non existent GDP growth or getting rid of their knife murderer and rapist population?
The source for the "private APIs" is the government run MTS-K.
https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/EN/Tasks/markettransparencyu...
Remarkable how you can spit out such an ignorant comment and then be wrong about it
99% of UK government IT makes you despair and then you get the 1% like this which are gems.
Gov.uk services are generally pretty high quality, at least from the citizen’s POV.
Yes one thing the UK state genuinely does well in general
And, the website feedback hooks are read by the coding team. I got a meaningful response to a UX issue inside 48h.
More unnecessary meddling, this causes price convergence so anyone living close to a typically lower cost source of fuel is going to have an almost imperceptible increase in relative cost.
They certainly love spending taxpayer money on nothing don't they.
Providing better price information makes a market work better.
In the above model prices converge on a mean, reducing the potential savings for those that price really matters (the poor are the ones most likely to check existing price discovery sites), thus it's regressive - the government are either seeing it as an opportunity to marginally increase tax rake, or more likely are oblivious to the externality of the poor bearing the burden.
That's... not how markets work. The cheap petrol stations are very much aware that they're cheaper than their neighbours already. The more expensive ones may feel some downward pressure, but mostly won't.
People who are price sensitive can discover cheaper alternatives more easily; others still won't bother
Which model? Tested how? Are the poor the most likely to check existing sites?
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.
Conversely, some expensive petrol stations won't be able to get away with staying so expensive.
> this causes price convergence
aka competition
coopertition
I see where you're going, but this happen now where I live. All prices are with in 2p of each other in a 2 mile radius.
but travel around 5miles and it's typically 5-9p cheaper
no way can this make it worse for me - hopefully people will travel to punish the garages.
> More unnecessary meddling
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...
We don't assume perfect information, or rather - it exists already in an unsanctioned form for those that seek it (usually those to whom price is sensitive).
Until this we assume marginality holds true and price dispersion has a benefit in society that we unwittingly enable.