Be Excellent To Each Other

Also, if you divide the tax amount by the pump price, you find that in relative terms (which is how it is calculated of course) tax has fallen. The numbers across the years are 73%, 77%, 77%, 67%, 67%. Required reading.

Yeah, even doing that on a quick guesstimate it looked like tax had dropped, relatively speaking. Which means the petrol companies are just gouging us.

I'm sure that they would say that their costs are going up all the time and they are just passing those costs on to the consumer. And how could we, humble consumers, possibly prove otherwise?

£60 is a little over 50 litres of diesel. My Corsa has a 40 litre tank, I'd be astonished if anything from a 3 series up didn't have more than 50. Petrol owners of course fair slightly better but it's still only 55 litres and if a Corsa has 40, surely most things have >55 otherwise you'd be filling up your stupid 3.0 penismobile every 2 journeys.

It's worth pointing out that's all in refining. Petrol STATIONS do not make money, pretty much literally.

Why is petrol going up? Oil is priced in dollars, so the price of a barrel is going up as the dollar continues its kamikaze dive headlong into the shitter.

But surely at the same time, other currencies (including sterling, for now) can buy more dollars and therefore more (well, the same) oil. Yet the pump price goes up?

In fascist USA, petrol buys YOU.
Er um, or something.

Yeah, point taken. (What follows is my understanding of the economics at play here, apologies if I'm misguided on anything.) The reason many stations struggle to make money (and indeed, the reason stations sell you overpriced milk, on which their margins are much higher than the petrol) is because they are franchises. The petrol distribution arm of Shell or Texaco or BP or whoever makes a fat ton of cash. Consider the previous graph, even coming from Right-Wing-Ville, which shows that 25p or so of the pump price goes to the firm. I understand that the petrol station itself sees vanishling little of that, just a fraction of a penny per litre; the rest is pretty much by definition going to end up in either the distribution firm and the refining firm. And they are the same firm!

Petrol stations make most of their money through the shop, I believe. And as for motorway service stations, if they weren't legally required to have them they wouldn't bother with the petrol station - it'd just be a Holiday Inn and a Welcome Break. Or so I have heard from people in the know.

That seems short-sited, as although you don't get any money from the petrol customers you do get footfall. You could argue that people stop on the motorway for a break as much as to get petrol, I suppose, and hence removing petrol wouldn't change the overall customer numbers coming onto the premises but that doesn't feel likely to me.

Yes, I'd agree that it seems more likely that you wouldn't stop there if there were no petrol - filling the tank up has been the main reason for probably more than 75% of the times I've stopped at service stations. It's really only on very long journeys when you stop just for a coffee or lunch.

*mumbles something about costs of doing business in different markets, hedge funds, hookers and coke...*

Yes this is pretty much all accurate to my knowledge.

I'm sure I read an article recently that was about petrol stations closing all over the place due to everyone filling up at supermarkets nowadays, as the supermarkets sell petrol at BELOW cost price.

I don't think they flat out sell petrol at a loss but they are certainly happy to sell it at cost. Part of it is getting you to visit the store ("I can do my shopping and get petrol at the same time") and part of it is so they can keep the little shop open longer hours than the store and clean up on selling overpriced milk and bread to forgetful people.

The bread is only overpriced because the corner shops threw a hissy fit at the 2p loaves.

Not becasue of the massive floods last year destroying all the wheat then?

No - 2p bread was years ago.

Ah, was it a price war style thing then, like when supermarkets were actually paying YOU to take their baked beans?

Didn't that happen with bananas once? I can remember a story about a guy getting so many loyalty points on bananas that they were effectively minus cost. He bought about half a tonne of the things.

Yes, it was when Tesco gave a load of bonus clubcard points on bananas that effectively made them cheaper than the cost of the bananas.

He gave the bananas away in the car park, and claimed his clubcard points.

Yes, but that's a false economy, as the supermarkets provide much worse petrol, which takes you less far. I've found that filling up at a proper petrol station is much cheaper, despite the cost per litre being higher, as the fuel gets me further.

You're clearly taking the piss, right?

No. I'm not.

Supermarkets water down their petrol?

I don't buy this. I've heard rumours on and off for years, and there was that off batch of Tesco petrol a few years ago, but if there really was something systematically wrong with supermarket petrol we'd have tons of verified actual cases and some juicy lawsuits now.

A few months ago.

Not wrong, per se, just inferior. There's hardly going to be a lawsuit for charging less for an inferior product. With Sainsburys petrol*, 2 return trips from London to Bristol is not going to happen in my car. With Esso petrol, it's not a problem.

* - I'd usually be for persuading people to buy at Sainsburys, as I have somthing of an interest in increasing their profits.

How many more miles do you think you get out of Esso fuel (roughly)?

Yay! This saved me lots of typing, thanks. I'm quite sick of being asked if I have a nectar card. No, I don't, and if you ask me tomorrow as well I'm going to start paying for everything in 5p coins. I don't care what the policy is, we both know I don't have one of your stupid cards.

The short version is that virtually always it's the same petrol. When I worked at Tesco we saw Texaco lorries as often as Tesco ones for example, franchises of Shell and the like just buy local petrol. The Tesco problems were confined to 1 single depot in Essex, which also supplied Morrisons in the area.

That said, I have 3 BPs right next to each other here near Hammersmith, and a Tesco near my parents in Amersham, once I get my car back I'll try both on the next two fill ups.

I vaguely recall from the internets around the fuel protests that all the petrol/fuel/whatever comes from something like two refineries.

The difference in the fuels comes when the companies add their own additive packages- the stuff that make Michael Schumachers tropical fish swim faster, or clean your engine etc.

It's like the companies trade/buy each other's fuel in different countries etc. I guess that saves a lot on transport costs.

I know it's supposed to be the same stuff and everything, but I remain convinced that there's "something" a bit different between Tesco and BP petrol.
We tried it with a Honda Insight recently. The Tesco fuel gets between 5 and 10MPG worse per tank. Repeatedly, over the same commute cycle.
Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with it, it just doesn't seem to let the car stay in lean-burn as well.

I would like to know what the difference is.

Mr Dave, what kind of car have you got?

Volvo 440. I'll ask my uncle (who used to work at BP) what the difference is. All he's said to me is that there was one when he worked there, but that they weren't really supposed to talk about it much.

As I said earlier, it's quite capable of consistently doing an extra london->Bristol length journey with Esso petrol over the sainsburys stuff. And I am not the only person I know who has found this.

But *why* would they bother doing this?

Beats me.

It's what they don't bother doing that makes the difference.

The theory here is that there are some additives that the expensive petrol stations add to their fuel that makes the car rum better that the supermarkets don't both with. I am extremely unconvinced, for the same reasons that I know all fuel pills and suchlike are scammy rubbish: there is basically not much you can put in petrol that does drastically effect how the car runs, certainly not on the "noticeable MPG higher" level that people claim to observe. Here is some interesting reading around this.

Perhaps it is actually rum rather than petrol.

I used to scoff at the idea that there was any practical difference myself, and I still think you'd be unlikely to notice it in a normal car. But as I say, it's repeatable and definitely a big enough difference to notice on the Honda above normal variation, looks like at least 6 or 7 %.

"The US consumes 20.8 million barrels of petroleum a day. A barrel of oil costs about $100 now I believe, go with that as it's a nice round number. In the US alone, a 5% improvement to fuel economy is a saving of $104mill PER DAY. If we assume the US uses, oh, 1/5th of all petrol then worldwide a 5% improvement in fuel economy is an approximate saving of $189.8 billion per year.

If you had the secret of magic things you could put in fuel that would improve fuel economy by 5% you'd be rich enough to hire Bill Gates to dress in a monkey suit and follow you around carrying your Nobel prize.

There are a lot of snake-oil products for fuel, but octane boosting additives, for example, are used and with measurable effect.

I don't think it's bizarre for the fuel companies to understand petrochemicals enough to add more ingredients to standard gasoline or whatever to make it work better. They already have different octane fuels besides.

Umm, what do you think fuel octane is? It has nothing to do with power output. Edumacation here.

Employ a person at every gas station to ensure everyone's tyres are inflated to the correct pressure. 5% improvement to fleet mileage.
Where do I get my prize now please thanks?

Seriously though, fuel economy is taken so un-seriously in the US, that pretty much any measure would have a dramatic effect. The point you are missing is that the oil and car industries and the government *DO NOT WANT* to reduce their oil consumption. It would not be a "saving" to them, so it is not in their interests to do it.


On the fuel difference thing, I'm not making it up, really. I didn't believe it, then I tested it, now I'm asking why there's apparently a measurable difference. Do Tesco heat their tanks or something?

edit:


So it's probably just that, right? Tesco gets a slightly lower blend from the refiners for a slightly lower price. Nothing to do with additives.

did I mention power? I don't think so.

Prevailing speed of traffic, traffic light cycles, air temperature, wind direction/speed - all vary slightly. As does the exact formulation of the petrol between batches - or possibly even the top and bottom of the underground tank, which will never be completely empty. Petrol does go off, so if it's been there for a long time it might be slightly less useful. A quieter station will probably have a dirtier tank too, so you might be getting more water/other contaminents in your tank too.

It might not vary so much that you'd notice day to day, but potentially enough to have a noticeable effect over the course of a tank of fuel.

You'd need a hub dyno running in a temperature and pressure controlled room and electronic control of the throttle to even get close to accurately measuring differences between fuel from two tankers.