...it first cost you £50 to fill your motor up? For me it was Oxford Services when I filled up my humble Mondeo this afternoon. OK the low fuel light had been on for 10 miles or so and it was 84.9p a litre for unleaded but nevertheless, OUCH!
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Gulf war - oil prices were fluctuating a tad and I do remember thinking how impressed I was the current administration ;-0
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I remember only too well filling up about a year ago in Cambridge and the bill was an eye watering £104.
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you young wippersnapers. I remember when in the 70's when petrol was UNAVAILBLE unless you got up early, queued up and I paid 1 yes 1 pound a gallon.
Place Hersham, car capri 1.6 xl mk1 facelift.
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Oh well, if we're playing that game, yes, we all remember Michael Barrett telling us that petrol was going to be an incredible pound a gallon on Nationwide, although of course one got quad Green Shield stamps to soften the blow.
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Neil,
Just to add insult to injury: there's an ASDA filling station (in Wheatley) not more than a mile from the M40 services. I bet you'd have paid less than 80p/litre there.
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Yes - 5 April 1999 at either Southwaite or Tebay services on the M6 (south).
The reason I know the date is that I recently looked on my driving licence to see when I was done for speeding as I was filling out an insurance form.
Seemed to remember it being one helluva expensive journey after my little run in with the OB on the M74.
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Gordon Brown gets the gold mine, you guys get the shaft.
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50 quid? mmmmmmmm... R600 of my money. My fill-ups cost ~35p/litre.
However, a few years back (circa 1985) the price here went throught the roof, and above the mystical R1:00 a litre. (These days it is R4.20 odd) Unfortunately most pump gauges only went up to 99.9c... so they were reset at 50.3c (or whatever) and then the amount shown was doubled at payment time. Very confusing!
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Same day as I spent more than £60 on petrol... last month in my Audi. 10% of the value of the car, almost... (and yes, I was doing a special run to clean out the petrol tank of unpleasant sludge...)
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PS, Tesco, Old Kent Road. Unleaded.
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(and yes, I was doing a special run to clean out the petrol tank of unpleasant sludge...)
By running through the fuel injection system? Brave man.....
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Talking about fuel, did anyone read the bit about fuel stations closing in the Times today, apparently in 1996 there was almost 21000 station and in 2004 there are only 10000 with numbers still falling.
One closed down around where I live a few months ago, now houses are being built on the site. The article didn't say anything about supermarkets which is where most of the sales have gone I would have thought.
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No , just into the fuel filter. The muck that came out of the fuel filter when I changed it last night was extraordinary!
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I remember when the price per litre rose to over $10/litre in Zimbabwe. The pumps there couldn't cope either, so they put a sticker on them stating X10. This was later upgraded to X100. Thats inflation I guess!!
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Filled up from red line on fuel idicator, with Shell diesel at Estepona on Monday last - cost me a whole 30 Euros.
BTW Not a scooter but a Fabia 1.9tdi
Roger.
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>...it first cost you £50 to fill your motor up?
Er, No! It cost an enormous £35 the other day and I nearly fell on the floor in shock!
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Spent £45 on my first MPV fill up today and that was only 3/4 of a tank! City Diesel @ 78.9ppl at Sainsburys in Sevenoaks. Saved 4ppl by spending over £100 in the store however.
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£70 this morning for a full tank of Shell Diesel!!!
Ok, it was for a LR Discovery, but still....!!
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general election not that far away and world oil prices rising, it will be interesting to see if Greedy Gordon gets the political wobbles and retreats on planned duty rise
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In these days of high fuel prices it is good to have a diesel. The Audi A4 can do 945 miles to a tank!
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>The Audi A4 can do 945 miles to a tank
In your dreams I bet no one has got 945 miles from a tank in any A4
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It has a 70 litre tank and can do 61+ mpg for extra-urban driving - if you drive carefully in clear traffic. Do the maths yourself! You should easily get 600 miles to a tank even if you drive only in town. The combined (urban + extra urban) figure is 800 miles a tank.
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That assumes you use every last drop of diesel in the tank, it also assumes that very one of the miles is done in optimum traffic conditions. You do the maths and you wont get 900 odd miles from a tank.
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RF - agree with you as I own one. Very happy with consumption which is steadily getting better. Now done 4.5k miles since new and seems to return 45mpg+ on motorway runs averaging 80-85 and 50-55mpg if I drive like a (polo)girl.
No chance of 900 miles - anybody got a road long enough and flat enough to sit in 6th at 30mph. Best I've got so far is 600 miles with real world driving. And I'm very happy with that !
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If the A8 in today's Top Gear can do 800 miles to a tank, I suspect some of the other models can do much more.
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Didn't see this, but isn't the A8 especially light? I seem to remember from when it was launched that the whole body is aluminium.
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it was just north of Paris, filled up a covette stingray, a Porsche 911 and the motorhome that we were travellign in.
It was my turn to pay, total was way over £100, but I can't remember just how much over.
--
I read often, only post occasionally
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If you can truly get 61mpg then 900+ miles on a tank is possible.
I get 800 miles from a tank in my 406hdi. 1000 miles per week driving at 70-80mph on mway & dual carriageway, I average around 51-52mpg. Despite having a 70ltr tank I fill up between 68-72 ltrs before the fuel warning light comes on! I assume that a tank rated at 70lts will probably take 10-15% extra.
If the same applies to the Audi @ 60mpg then 900 miles is feasible.
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The point is that the diesel drivers talking about getting 800-900+ miles to a tank while those driving petrol cars will do well to get 300-400.
I reached the £50+ tank just before the fuel protests in autumn 2000. If those daft protesters are back and the panic fuel queues occur again at Shell, BP etc, then it the extra miles per tank could be very useful.
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Well I've managed to stick to the speed limits for about 2 months now (honestly I don't think I've broken a limit) and I now get 400 miles from my tank (2.0 litre Passat) rather than the 300 I was getting. I guestimate that's a £800 per year saving, and no risk of fines for speeding.
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Slightly off-thread, but in 1965 when I started teaching, the filling station on Cambridge Road, Ely did 4 gallons for £1, which more or less filled up my Fiat 600D (but then my salary was only £730 p.a.).
Time for my Sanatogen and a nap..............
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To understand the real price of anything you should look at how long it takes to earn the money to pay for it. On this measure just about everything associated with motoring, particularly the cars themselves, is probably cheaper than it has ever been. The exception seems to be insurance. My first car at 17 years old with a fresh licence was a Triumph Herald convertible which cost £125 to buy and £35 TPFT to insure, 28% of the value of the car. This was on the edge of London too. I can't see a 17 yr old today insuring a £1000 convertible for £280. But maybe £35 was a lot of money back in 1974...
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From the This is Money inflation calculator
1974. £35 2004. £208-40
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Mine was a Ford Anglia for £99.50 in 1976 TPF&T
At the time that was about what I earned on the Farm in a month. Anyone know what a farm hand would earn for a month now ?
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Who said "nostalgia is the file that removes the edges from the good old days"? What year was it UK went decimal? 70 or 71? Anyhow I was working evenings on the pumps to bolster the miserable salary I was getting from American Express at a Regent (remember that?) station. On the night before decimal 4 star was 6/3d a gallon. Next day we had to repost the prices at 31½ New Pence a gallon.
The confusion was absolute. No one in government had given any real thought to whether or not people would understand the new currency so left the retailers to do it for them. I drew up a big chart with comparative values on each and we used to explain to all the old dears in their Morris Minors how it all worked. No matter how hard we tried everyone took the view that the government was ripping them off and everything was more expensive........
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Wow. The price went DOWN?
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No, hang on *gets out fingers*.. I take it back..spot on..
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6/3 is 31 1/4p, so it HAD gone up.
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< >
It may well be but, apart from insurance, motoring costs much less now. ''You've never had it so good''
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>>Well I've managed to stick to the speed limits for about 2 months now (honestly I don't think I've broken a limit) and I now get 400 miles from my tank (2.0 litre Passat) ....
pdc - I was thinking the same way and have now run my own less than scientific mini-test, albeit only for 3 days and one tank fill. It makes more of a difference than I thought. Average mpg before was 31 mpg driving at up to 90 on the motorway (90% of my miles) and urban driving at the same speed everyone else in the queue is doing. Slowing down to 70-75 on the motorway and same urban style, I've just calculated my mpg on the last tank as 39.2 mpg. My 60 litre tank would therefore give me an almost diesel like 516 miles if I was brave enough ;-) On my twice weekly 250 mile return run, it will add no more than half an hour in the car to my day. Over 30,000 miles a year that would save me £720. Better than a kick in the ....
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If I've dome my sums right (probably not!) the price of a gallon of petrol rose by more in May 2004 than a whole gallon used to cost in 1964. I recall the figures quoted earlier in the thread (4 Gallons for £1 = half a crown a gallon = 12.5 p today). Petrol up about 4p a litre, times 4.4 for the rise on a gallon = 17p QED!
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Dome my sums right, dumb my sums right, done my sums right - at last!
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I'm still in a position where £50 will buy me much more than a tankful! A2 has a 44 litre tank, the most I've ever put in is 40 litres and that's still only £32. I put in 22 litres yesterday after covering 300 miles - almost 62 mpg.
The smart only has a 33 litre tank and will get 45 mpg round town - a Zippo lighter costs more to fill!
The local Shell station has an HGV pump - makes your eyes water when you see £200 as the last purchase!!
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The local Shell station has an HGV pump - makes your eyes water when you see £200 as the last purchase!!
>>
No wonder the truckies get fed up!
Does anyone on here know of/use this filling station near Blackpool that, according to this morning's DT, is selling unleaded for £1.09 per litre ?
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The first time I ever spent more than £50 on a fill up, I did it with style :D
It was in an '81 Aston Martin Vantage and it cost about £65.
If I remember correctly that was for about 80-odd litres of super unleaded so it wasn't even close to a proper fill-up, the tank holds 110 litres!
Oh, and in case anyone was interested in the mileage I did on those 80-odd litres - 250 miles :D
Cheap at half the price!
Not sure whether I've ever broken the £50 barrier since, but I've definitely come close.
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Sorry, sir. Not even in the late fifties when I was let loose upon an unsuspecting road-using public was petrol ever half-a-crown a gallon. In 1963 I was paying 4/3½d a gallon at my local Fleetline station, that was for Regular. Mind you on 14 quid a week (and overtime needed to earn that) someone is now going to tell me motoring is cheaper today than it was then.......
Then of course you could spread out the cost of motoring a bit. I used to drive around for weeks with a bit of paper on the windscreen saying "Tax applied for".........
A 520 X 13 John Bull cross ply remould at the place where I worked cost about £4.0.0d and an oil change was free -- you just collected all the dregs from all the Castrol XL cans used on customers' cars until you had enough for your own ;+).
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