So I took a tiki tour today. From Auckland down to Hamilton, checked out Punnet cafe (which I was very impressed with by the way) then on to Matamata for a kids party. And then finally home tonight.
What I was trying to do is find out how far my new car would go on a full tank of Diesel. I had reset the trip ODO last time I filled it up, and it had about half a tank left. So as I was driving around I was looking at the variation in Diesel prices, in Auckland it was about $0.82 cpl through to about $1.10 per litre, thats a pretty big gap in my opinion, but I kept my eyes open and found some good deals on my trip.
In Hamilton I found Gull doing 0.769 cents per litre. I was pretty tempted to fill up since I only had about quarter of a tank but I powered on determined to find out how many kms on a tank my car would do. Now I have to say that the first 1/2 of the tank was spent driving around Auckland City over the last week and when I left I had about 1/2 a tank so I guess I got a good mix of round the city driving and some open road. I ended up driving back into Auckland with the fuel light on and got to Greenlane before I had to get some Diesel. I ended up paying the most expensive $1.10 at Z but I needed to get home and was in a rush so only put a little bit in.
The whole point of this was for me to find out the estimated cents per km for this particular car, taking into account road user charges etc.
I did two calculations, one with the upper costings and most tax on the road user charges. (Paying $1.109 per litre and Road user charges purchased in 1000km blocks) and the lower using the cheapest price I saw today ($0.769 and paying road tax in 10000km blocks $63 per 1000kms)
My upper and lower came out to this.
$0.12608 c/km ~ lower
$0.16141 c/km ~ upper
Now obviously I understand there is more costs involved with running a car such as servicing, wear & tear, oils, fluids etc... but was interested to compare. But it got me thinking about the price differences are these days when comparing it to what it was like 10-15 years ago when most gas stations sold it withing a few cents of each other.
What are your thoughts / costs?
FYI Car is a 2014 Mazda 6 S/W and I got 720kms out of a full tank of diesel. I probably could have pushed another 10-20kms, but I got the idea by then.