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What's The Real Cost Of Fuelling Your Car

With fuel prices ever in the news and always on the rise, new research carried out has found that we work for an average of 247 hours (or 30.8 working days) of the year, in order to pay for filling up our cars. The study undertaken by leading vehicle supplier OSV Ltd found that more than 12% of our wage is put towards the cost of our diesel or petrol.

We spend 253 days working per annum, clocking up 2024 hours work during the same. In the 1980s we would have worked the equivalent of 296 hours to fuel our cars up, but today that figure has dropped to 247 hours.

When it comes to the cost of fuelling your beloved motor, you might be surprised to find out that we are actually working less to cover this expense than we did in the 80s. Back then, the average wage was £2.83 per hour, compared to £13.83 today. This equates to an average yearly wage of £5,720 in the 1980’s compared to a much healthier £28,000 today.

Based on today’s figures, a litre of fuel costs roughly about the same amount as you earn in 5 minutes - costing approximately £1.14. Back in the 80’s it would have taken 6 minutes to equal 0.28p, which was the equivalent cost of a litre of petrol back then.

Going further back to when some of today’s grandparents were starting to drive in the 60s, the average yearly income was £562 a year (27.7p per hour) and a litre of fuel cost 11.6p - we would have had to spend 62% of our yearly income on filling our cars an average 50 times a year, the equivalent of 1256 hours of our time at work.

With the average tank holding a fairly generous 60 litres (or 12 gallons) of fuel, our 5 hours of work needs to earn us £69.15 to cover the cost each time we fill up. Back in the 70s when a litre of fuel was 16p we needed to put in 16 hours, or two full days, of hard graft to earn the £9.60 required to fill up.

The average UK driver will fill their tank around 50 times per year. In 1980 your 50 visits to the petrol pump to fill up with around 60 litres of fuel, would cost you around £840 per annum. In today’s money, the same amount of time and fuel would set you back around £3,420.

If time is money, then we are potentially wasting it by spending as much as 20 minutes a time to fill up with petrol in the first place. Over the course of a year, that’s a whopping 16.6 hours!

Debbie Kirkley joint-company Director of OSV comments: In spite of our worries over fuel prices this latest research is showing that we are still better off than we were nearly sixty years ago when it comes to filling up our cars. For drivers keen to save on fuel there are an abundance of tips out there, from going easy on the accelerator, to things probably few of us know, such as the lower your tyre pressure the more fuel your car consumes. I’m sure that the much more fuel efficient cars of today are also a bonus to our pocket and the environment. Even with all this in mind I’m sure we’ll all be keeping a keen eye on fuel prices over the next 6-12 months.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by OSV Ltd .