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By my calculations, I fill up my car with petrol every 27.5 days

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.

Days between petrol station visits

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.

By Daniel Bowen

Transport blogger / campaigner and spokesperson for the Public Transport Users Association / professional geek.
Bunurong land, Melbourne, Australia.
Opinions on this blog are all mine.

4 replies on “By my calculations, I fill up my car with petrol every 27.5 days”

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.

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