Has AApetrolBusters gone?

They sent an email to everyone who had a log-in (I got one, anyway), saying that the site was being closed down. Don't remember why. Lack of use?

IIRC, they closed down three or four months ago.

AA cutbacks following their sale to a venture capital company. The big oil companies probably didn't like it either.

Anyway, Sainsburys had the cheapest diesel in Cheltenham today. 81.9p per litre. Tesco were selling it at 83.9p and other filling stations at anything between 83.9p and 87.9p.

I managed to get some petrol from Total for 77.9p a litre on the A322 going north out of Guildford. A couple of miles further at Brookwood, the Total there was selling at 80.9p!

I bet the big oil companies hated it!

I found it was (within limits) remarkably detailed and surprisingly accurate.

Pity it's gone.

On Fridays, the London Evening Standard has a colour supplement on Cars and Motoring. There is always a little corner reporting on the cheapest petrol stations, usually 3 or 4, within the metropolis in that week. I remember it was on the front page last time I looked. It was pandemonium during the petrol shortage and long queues at filling stations some ?6-7 years ago. Not sure the survey report is still a regular feature.

I wonder if it would be possible to run it like a Wiki - open contributions from locals who note the price at particular stations and post it when they get round to it.

Enough people doing it would make it effective.

Remember people - going out of your way by perhaps only a few miles negates the cheaper cost of the fuel. You're perhaps better off just getting it from somewhere when you're passing anyway.

andyt

ISTR reading that the AA don't do the car inspections anymore either.

andyt

It reminds me of the days of the petrol shortage about 25 years ago. When people heard of a filling station that had petrol available, they were driving around for an hour or so to make room in their tank just so that they could top it up! (A bit like the mentality of people in this newsgroup nowadays, come to think of it.)

Remember the days when petrol companies used to advertise on TV? "Put a tiger in your tank", "The Esso sign means happy motoring"... and the supposed magic ingredients in Shell petrol, etc, etc. :-)

You do need to do some quick sums, though. Those two figures are 3p/litre apart, which is well over £1/tankful for most cars. Knowing mine costs about 10p/mile, it's well worth a detour of a couple of miles. In fact, a couple of miles extra is almost justified by a 1p saving.

John Laird ( snipped-for-privacy@laird-towers.org.uk) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :

Tank in mine holds 85-90 litres. I'd break even on a 20 mile round trip... If I could be bothered.

The message from "Dave" contains these words:

Because it would be cumbersome and hard to find the data you want easily on a regular basis.

It'd also dissolve in a mess of arguments about supermarket petrol vs bigco petrol and so on.

Just a simple Wiki structure would do fine - or even a voting system where you could show a graph of prices people have submitted across the past three or four days for any site.

Many, many moons ago there was a site mentioned on uk.transport that did this - it predated the AA one by a long way.

Try

Mind The Gap

"Walt Davidson" emitted :

You've been listening to John Shuttleworth... :-)

Yeah my ex used to make a 4 mile round trip just to get the cheapest petrol!

I'm really lucky in that the Shell garage around the corner from work is really cheap and I can get my pluspoints too! Well I will when I'm back from Budapest...