Your awareness of petrol prices?

[Netcurtainnelly]

How aware are you when you fill up your car if what it's costing you?

Talking to a family member yesterday, who uses their car to travel round for work,and they said they just fill up and don't bother really keeping track of the cost.

Surely if self employed, you'd need to know as you mean need to adjust your prices to your customers you visit.

Do you just fill up and pay or are you actively tracking the price.
AIBU to assume, someone who is self employed and visiting customers would be monitoring the costs?

I fill up once a month and am aware of how much petrol costs in my area, doing our big shop at Costco tomorrow so will fill up there because it’s much cheaper than locally. There’s nothing I can do because we need to be able to use the car but if I’m paying more for fuel I need to adjust other things in the budget to cover it.

I think it was a joke. Quite a good one.

Because you may have to fill up regardless and/or they have have sufficient funds that the price rises don’t materially impact them. Plenty of people can absorb the cost without noticing.

I fill the car up each time and am fortunate enough to never have to worry about the total.

However, I do compare prices per litre. I'm slightly alarmed to see the rises and know it'll get worse. I generally go for the cheapest petrol stations whilst trying to frequently support those local to me.

It's the same if you commute by train. You just have to suck up any above inflation increases. It makes a huge difference if you buy an annual season ticket. At least with fuel it does drop down periodically.

People do notice though, even if you can take the hit. They just have no choice.

I use about tank a month and that's about £80. Diesel has gone up about 20% so really it's about £15 a month extra.

Yeah but using motorway stations is a fools game.

@Netcurtainnelly well he'll be keeping a record of it for tax, but tracking it? How do you think he should 'track it'? He needs to put fuel in when he needs to irrespective of the cost as he needs to get to customers. What does he do? Most SE people can't just change their prices on a whim depending on the price of petrol that day and even
if he can. How does 'tracking' help. It's down to what it actually costs.

my very good friend is a taxi driver so we use a petrol app to check on the current prices as for him at 3 tanks a week it makes a good difference. However. his preferred fuel is currently still only 3p a litre more than the cheapest locally so he's sticking with that. I'm not using much and due to a health issue I'm sticking to my local station I'm comfortable with, it's a few pennies a litre more but with how little I'm using & being comfortable there it's worth it to me

On the farm we can see our costs going up. We don't have a choice as can't farm without machinery. We don't have the option of passing on the full cost to the buyer as they just won't pay.

Majority of fuel is red diesel so obviously cheaper but still seeing the same increase

Oh you've set me off I was doing so well not laughing. 🤣🤣🤣

My taxi driver friend can't either really. Most of his is now in a contract (so fixed prices) anything local they have to use a meter (& the council are entirely shit at putting the prices up) & anything out of borough is mostly existing customers so he doesn't like to. His contract is SEN kids school runs through the council & as contacts need renewing the council are dropping the price by a minimum of 25% & the good drivers aren't taking them
on, in some cases they'd be costing them money, especially with fuel increasing.

parents are going to end up with different drivers turning up each day not knowing who is going to be taking their kids to school or picking them up & not getting the more experienced, safer drivers. Some runs won't get done.

I notice a lot. My car has a 100 litre tank. Even pennies on the per litre price makes a reasonable difference to me.
I know the cheapest fuel prices at petrol stations near me and plan so I fill up there.
Currently Sainsbury's are cheapest but even with them there is quite a difference in price between the 3 stores I am near regularly.

I'm also surprised by the people who either don't ever know what the fuel price is or shrug and say, it costs what it costs - without seeming to realise that the price varies from garage to garage.

But it's not just the cost of filling your own tank. It's the knock on effect on the prices of goods and services!

I do 400 miles a week, I’m painfully bloody aware!

Very aware but need fuel so can’t do much about it.

I don’t take notice - I fill up once a month at most. Even when prices rise it only adds a couple of quid to the cost so not really noticeable.

I've noticed the rapid increase in prices recently and it doesn't seem to be slowing down. The difference in price between the cheapest local petrol stations and the most expensive is 19p a litre which is a 15% difference in price and that's hard to justify. Fuel Map UK is handy for keeping track of prices.

My car only has a 50l tank but the difference between the cheapest local garage and the most expensive works out to over £10 a tankful.

Since we fill 2 cars 2-3 times a week yes when out we top up at what we see cheapest anywhere between 46-72 up our end for unleaded

I pump my bike tyres up on a Monday morning.

Yes, I can tell you exactly how much every garage charges for petrol between my home and the city 50 miles away.

I know which petrol stations are usually the cheapest and I make sure I fill up when one of them is on my route.

It costs me about €60 for a tank of fuel and as we live very rurally, I drive everywhere.

I just fill up when I need to. I know roughly how much a tank holds, but I never look at the prices.
When I was self-employed, I did keep receipts, but I couldn't change my fees dependent on petrol prices. I just used the receipts to total up the amount to put in my end of year accounts.

Very.

My ford fiesta is £15 a tank more than it was a month ago.

The red diesel prices and heating oil I’m seeing on the farm are huge as well. Hello inflation my old friend.

Don't really take much notice, neither does my OH.

We will go to a cheaper filling station of course (usually our local supermarket) but if the tanks need filling, they need filling so filled they get.
It will raise a comment from one (or both) of us if the MoHo takes over £100 to fill but there is not much we can do except grin & bare it.

We have an EV (mine for doing short journeys to school and my work 3.5 miles away) and a diesel (DH) as he travels a round trip of about 350 miles for work about once a month (during normal weeks he gets the train to the city centre or WFH). So we have noticed the price rises but DH gets his money back on expenses and we otherwise use my car.

My car has very good fuel consumption and so it doesn’t affect me loads. It’s a VW Up and honestly, it practically runs on fumes. It has a tiny tank so doesn’t cost a lot to fill up and a tank lasts ages. I don’t drive enormous amounts day to day but we do some occasional long drives and it really lasts -
you don’t really have to factor in petrol costs as a big deal.

I try and fill up at the cheapest near to me - use an app to work it out
Have to travel for work and get 45p a mile - has been same rate for years
I do not have an alternative - live in a rural area and can’t use public transport due to my disabilities