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 just let it wash over me now. When I was early in my career and doing significant amounts of travel there were lorry strikes and protests that the cost of fuel was in the region of 65p per litre and the horrifying expense of this was going to bring the country to a standstill. And yet here we are. In 20 years we will remember that fuel used to be only £1.50 per litre and will marvel at how cheap that seems.

I don't pay ANY attention to petrol prices because I'm epileptic and forbidden by law from driving.

It's just another thing privileged people complain about.

In 2012 it was £1.39 a litre.

Hardly a catastrophe at £1.50 in 2026.

Very common that posters on MN comment on the cost of living, and how much the weekly shop has gone up in the supermarket, yet in this post so many posters saying they pay no attention to fuel prices and it costs what it costs. But around here supermarket petrol is £1.39 and just up the road it's £1.52. Do people really just fill up at the higher price regardless? I make a mental note of the prices as I drive by even though I only fill up once a month, these days I'm not throwing money away that I don't need to.

I’m not sure what work the person does, but unfortunately it’s not often as simple as putting your prices straight up to reflect an increased cost to you when you’re self employed.

If you’ve already got an agreed price for the work you can’t change it because costs to you have gone up - the customer would have every right to cancel.

Or if you have published rates in line with competitors then regular customers could go somewhere else if you change them regularly or to more than the competition.

My husband is self employed and prices work months in advance. He’s just been told some materials are going up 12-15% he could try and pass that on but he’d risk losing the work / starting on the wrong foot with a new customer.

He certainly hasn’t factored in the rising cost of petrol on top at all.

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t notice it going up, but like everyone whose wages haven’t gone up, he has to absorb these costs out of his money.

It’s gone up by 15p per litre at the one by me but if you go on the website or app petrol prices you can see the cheapest nearby

I have same car but in Seat version

i was on a trip south and was getting 64mpg, even with roof rack and bike on top 😂

they really are good on fuel 14.5 miles to the liter is pretty good

Pretty low drama here in Surrey. It’s about £10 more to fill up. No queues. No conversations about it. Driving is still massively cheaper than public transport for me.

I fill up once a week and I am running a small firm of builders we use £1200 a week in our diggers etc which is now gone up as well
skip firm has just put a 10% increase on costs as a fuel surcharge
also had merchants emailing this week re prices going up
heating oil is the real shocker at the moment which has nearly trebled

I fill up maybe once every six weeks. I don't really notice too much, it seems to cost roughly about the same each time.

My car has two tanks so roughly 130 litres. I topped up under a quarter a couple of days ago and it was $100. Would cost me over $400 to fill the tanks now.

I was in a different part of the country last week, we covered a lot of miles, so filled up a fair bit. The prices of petrol were all over the place. When we saw a low one we filled up. Some were ridiculously high, others the same as normal before Iran. We always check the price locally, there is an app.

Same here. We are rural and need a car. I am aware of how much petrol is and am trying to use the car less often.

I fill up twice a week. Don’t look at the price, I have to fill it up either way, so what’s the point.

What I am aware of is people concerned about fuel prices, but they drive in a way that abundantly wastes the stuff 🤷‍♀️

keeping their foot on the accelerator when approaching a red light, on the motorway slip road, approaching a queue of traffic

I’m not so worried about how other people manage their finances

I carry on as normal. Fill up when it needs filling. If it costs more then I will have to suck it up.

At least lots drive electric cars now so in theory less demand for fuel at least 5% of cars on the road are electric and I think they make up 1 in 4 sales now.

I work for the NHS in the community. I drive about 300 miles a week for work. I know exactly how much fuel costs. Across my area prices vary by 10p a litre so I go to the cheaper places.
It's pretty grim at the moment.

I don’t pay attention to the cost. I just fill the tank to full and move on.

We mostly use EV but do have one petrol car. I filled it last week and it wasn’t much more expensive than last time I did it a few months ago, maybe £10 ish more for nearly a full tank. I didn’t look if other petrol stations were cheaper, it’s not going to make a huge difference.

I'm not self-employed, but I have absolutely no idea about petrol prices. I just fill up and pay. It would never occur to me to check the prices. My husband asked me a few weeks ago what the price of petrol was in Sainsbury's and was astonished that I had no clue!!

Fair enough, but I just can't get my head around this. If you're filling up twice a week that's 8 or 9 tankfulls a month, surely that could be £100 more if you get the most expensive compared with supermarket fuel?

I guess you might mean you have no choice where you fill up or you get it from a supermarket anyway, but I couldn't ignore that potential saving.

But that could be a tenner on a tank of petrol. Just for keeping your eyes open when you're driving round on your normal journeys and filling up when you notice a petrol station 10p per litre cheaper than your "usual" one. To me it's a no brainer, but each to their own!

Yes, a different topic, but a big yes to wasting fuel due to poor driving habits, particularly the heavy right foot syndrome of heavy acceleration closely followed by heavy braking, which is often completely unnecessary but just a poor driving habit. Smooth driving can save a fortune in fuel costs and also save money in less wear and tear on the car, particularly brakes and suspension.

Trouble is our local Tesco is cheapest but people know this and have been queueing down the block when I pass. I have a small car with a 37 litre tank so I'd rather pay 5p more a litre and nip in elsewhere on my way to work.