Petrol pump pleasure

Went to put some petrol in my car yesterday (I hesitate to say 'fill up' - see the explanation at the end of this post), and what a pleasure!

Thanks to a sustained drop in oil prices globally, we here in SA have had two substantial price decreases in the prices at the pumps over the last two months. This has meant a drop of nearly 33% since October (from roughly R9 a litre to about R6 a litre), on top of some smaller drops before October.

The real difference is in how people perceive it, though, and everyone will have a different outlook on what a drop in prices means to them. For me, I generally put R250 worth of petrol into my car at a time (2.5l BMW). As prices reached their peak near the middle of 2008, I had resigned myself to the fact that my petrol gauge would only slide up to slightly less than half a tank. The effect of the drops in price really hit home yesterday when, after putting R250 into an unusually empty tank (I don't normally go down to my warning light), my gauge jumped up to the three-quarter full mark! What a beaut! In my car, I get roughly 10km/l, so I was getting 240-260 km's each time I filled up 6 months ago. Now, I should get closer to 400-420 km's per stop at the garage. For me, that's the equivalent of an extra 12 return trips to my girlfriend's house - although if I were to visit her that often, she'd probably throw a fit!

Now, the reason I fill my car up with that specific amount is a sound one. If you only put in small amounts at a time, you are doing yourself a serious disservice - you 'lose' more petrol if your tank is emptier, as there is more space for fumes to form, and you lose a fair amount to evaporation with these fumes escaping. You also spend more of your hard-earned money making small detours to petrol stations as you have to 'fill up' more often. On the other hand, unless you're driving long-distance, it's not advisable to fill your car up to the brim - you lose a percentage of your fuel to increased fuel consumption, due to the extra weight associated with carrying that much fuel. Hence, my happy medium of filling up somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a tank...

Happy driving!