Hunting for halfway decent petrol prices is a bloody chore. Anyone who tells ya the best strategy for dealing with it is to just fill up your car whenever you see cheap petrol, regardless of how full your tank is at the time, clearly has too much bloody time on their hands. What’s a car-driving punter who can’t afford a Tesla to do?
Well, if you live in New South Wales, a long-promised measure has just come into effect: all servos now have to provide fuel prices in real-time. It’s part of new Fair Trading legislation that affects all 2000 odd servos in the state.
Basically, it all comes down to a report by the ACCC that, while consumers in NSW are paying the lowest prices in more than a decade, servos are making record profits. Which means the savings aren’t really being passed on. The Government tends to care about this stuff because petrol is – unfortunately, many would argue – kinda one of those household expenses that makes our entire society function, so profiteering is regulated.
One of the big data benefits of that change is that we can have a infobase of the cheapest places to get petrol in New South Wales at any given time.
That info is available for app developers to work their magic with, but it’s also available on an imaginatively-named web app named Fuel Check. Glorious Leader Mike Baird announced it via a Facebook post, the comments of which are predictably flooded with people talking about lockouts and greyhounds.
Basically, you can punch in your deets – the fuel you need, and whereabouts you’re located, and it’ll spit out the cheapest fuel near you.
You can also check out the average price on a chart, if you’re a big ole nerd.
Nifty!
But look, it isn’t all sunshine and roses. A big chunk of petrol cost is tax, which is raised in line with CPI twice per year. It makes up roughly 41 percent of what consumers pay at the bowser. Some reckon that Baird’s strategy is just another way of putting the onus of petrol prices on the owners of servos rather than the government itself.
NRMA spokesperson Peter Khoury told the Daily Telegraph that the take from their end is that fuel tax should be put back into roads funding – not general spending. “The fuel tax has served the government handsomely,” Mr Khoury said. “Our strong view is that if this tax is to increase year on year, it must be directed back into road funding.”
Look, whether you think this is all a smokescreen or a stitch-up, you’ve got detailed petrol price data now. If you’re still zooming around Sydney in ya mum’s old Corolla, whack this shit on your homescreen.
Source: Fuel Check / Facebook.
Photo: Getty Images.
