With the usual media coverage of petrol price rises over Easter (yes, that’s how the market economy works… when demand goes up, so do prices…), I was pondering how much money I’ve been spending on petrol.
The car barely goes anywhere on weekdays, and even on the weekends I’m doing perhaps around 50 kilometres.
Given I never pay cash at petrol stations, I had a quick skim through my credit card history to see how often I fill up. And the answer is that the median number of days between fills is 27.5 days. (Usually I don’t bother going in unless the tank is under about 15% full.)
Sometimes it’ll be as short as a week or so between petrol visits — such as over the Christmas period when there’s often a trip or two up to the country. But at other times I’ll go as much as 42 days between refills.
I also worked out that I’ve spent $716.26 on petrol in the past year, and my median petrol cost per day is $1.71… so I suppose about 1.3 litres at current costs.
But I’m lucky enough that most of the time, I simply don’t use much petrol, because most of my trips each week are either on foot or on PT.
Be nice if more people had that option.
- 20/8/2009: The monthly refueling
4 replies on “By my calculations, I fill up my car with petrol every 27.5 days”
Do you drive a car or ride a lunar cycle?
(Sorry, couldn’t resist…)
If you’ve got an Android phone I highly recommend the app ‘aCar’. Great for keeping track of car expenses and can give you these sort of stats very quickly. There is a free version in the market place to try out.
So you drive 50 ks on the weekend and fill up every 4 weeks ? Thats like 200 ks a tankfull ? I’d be checking if your car has a leak.
I filled my car up 2 weeks ago, drove a whopping 3 km in the last two weeks ( once to the supermarket and back ), and its now only half full. I don’t know where it all goes. Use it or lose it, I guess.
@enno, no. The median is 27.5, but typical in the weeks I don’t drive much (as shown by the graph) is closer to 35-40 days. And now I think about it, maybe I don’t consistently wait until down to 15% in the tank… perhaps it’s closer to 20-25%, and when I spot a servo at the cheap end of the price cycle, and no queue.