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Are you spending too much on petrol?

lovemoney staff
by Lovemoney Staff lovemoney staff on 07 September 2011  |  Comments 8 comments

Petrol is a massive cost for many households. If you know how much you're spending, it's easier to make cuts.

Are you spending too much on petrol?

These days petrol  - or diesel - makes up a massive chunk of the average household’s budget in the UK. The average spend is about £1,500 a year!

One way to cut your spending is to monitor your fuel usage really carefully. If you know how much you’re spending, you’ll be more likely to drive in a more fuel efficient way.

The best way to monitor your spending is to use the lovemoney.com Tracker tool. We’ve had great feedback from our users. It works by automatically aggregating your online accounts in one place to give you a complete overview of your spending habits.

Your spending will be broken down into lots of different categories so that you can easily see areas where you’re overspending.

It also helps you compare your spending with other people. Are you spending more than £1,500 a year petrol and fuel? Tracker can help you find out. Then you can focus on looking for ways to cut that spend.....

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Comments (8)

  • Iamcoldsteve
    Love rating 311
    Iamcoldsteve said

    @klawman

    I agree with most of what you just said, except the comments about OEM being conservative and the comment about calibration improvements being zero cost.

    Firstly, OEM have many more factors that they need to balance and also have to warrant their product. Remappers have more freedom to ignore some restrictions placed on OEMs, eg emissions. OEMs have MUCH more stringent emissions limits and measurements than a car in use that has it's annual MOT test (practically a joke compared to what OEMs have to do) so remappers can almost ignore emissions. They also don't usually offer a 60,000 mile warranty for the engines durability or have a useful life expectation of, say, 150,000 miles. So they can increase loadings on engine parts, get closer to the limits of turbo maps etc etc almost without having to pick up the pieces (sometimes literally) if it all goes wrong. Also people who have remaps done will (generally speaking) put up with other niggles in their quest for better power etc. Eg a turbo going into surge would be a MASSIVE problem for an OEM, but probably less so for a remapper.

    Secondly, any calibration improvement has a cost. There is the development cost, engine tests, legislative tests, etc to be done. Calibration development cost more than most people think, engine testing is not cheap, and the equipment needed to do it on is also extremely expensive.

    Report on 15 September 2011  |  Love thisLove  0 loves
  • Vinod Raju
    Love rating 0
    Vinod Raju said

    The AA recently identified that, compared to a year ago, “a typical 50-litre petrol refill now costs £9.61 more, adding £40.81 to the monthly petrol spend of a two-car family” (http://www.theaa.com/motoring_advice/news/august-fuel-price-report-2011.html)

    Research at BlablaCar has indicated that 87% of Brits are concerned about the rising costs of petrol, which has made the overall cost of running a car increasingly difficult to manage. This prompted nearly 40% of them to reduce the number of long distance trips they made last year.

    However, the same reserach showed that only 11% shared their ride to reduce the running cost. More people can reduce the cost of their long distance trip by carpooling. For example, a typical driver on http://www.blablacar.com could save as much as £60 on single trip from Manchester to London.

    Report on 26 September 2011  |  Love thisLove  0 loves

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