How to Save Money on Fuel for Your Vehicle

In this section, we discuss how vehicle maintenance, wise purchasing decisions and reformed driving habits can help you be more efficient and make  significant savings. We have split our guide into three sections:

Fuel efficiency calculator

Use the calculator to work out how much petrol or diesel you’ll need to complete your journey, and how much it will cost you.

The best things in life are free, and if you’re wondering how to get more miles to the gallon, you’ll find that many of the most dramatic benefits come through learning how to drive economically. Read on to find out more about:

• How lighter vehicles use less petrol
• Economical driving techniques
• Everything you need to know about premium fuel, tyre pressure, servicing and journey planning

Take note of these additional tips in order to spend less:

• Your car may be technically compatible with premium quality petrols, but that doesn’t mean that it actually benefits from being filled up with them. Only high performance cars – such as sports cars and upper tier luxury vehicles – need to be filled up with premium fuel. Otherwise, you are just paying extra for no extra benefits
• Over-inflate your tyres and you can expect to see handling problems. But if you fall below the recommended pressure, you will see your miles per gallon (MPG) start to plummet. Save on petrol: check your tyres
• A recently serviced vehicle with no mechanical problems or developing aches and pains will be a lot more efficient than any car or van that is slowly starting to fall apart
• Planning a journey so that you always take the shortest route (with the least time spent idling in queues) will always mean greater efficiency. Use Google Maps or the AA’s route planner

Nationwide Vehicle Contracts has a wide range of fuel efficient cheap lease deals. Here are some of our most popular fuel efficient options and their typical MPG.

Ensuring greater fuel efficiency

Ensuring greater fuel efficiency through best practice will only get you so far. In fact, those pennies you save may well be completely irrelevant if you’re filling up at an expensive petrol station. How do you find the best deal on petrol in your area? We have briefly reviewed some of the petrol pricing options currently available on the internet and on your phone.

Petrolprices.com

This is probably the best of the services on offer, although some users may be put off by the need to register to use the website. Nevertheless, signing up is free and will ensure you receive free email updates on prices in your area on a schedule of your choosing. The site additionally plots stations on an interactive map, as well as providing in-depth analysis of where you are in relation to each station, the price of fuel there and the date that data was last updated.

Update frequency is impressive: the site claims 8,000 daily updates. A comprehensive ‘PetrolPrices Pro’ app is available for iOS and Android, currently priced at £3.

Whatgas.com

Offering up all its information without the need to register, Whatgas.com is an attractive alternative. Again, petrol station locations are positioned on an interactive map. Clicking on each flag will show the price of Unleaded 95, Diesel and LPG Autogas in pence per litre, alongside the date each price was updated. Users can provide this information themselves for other users of the service.

Prices are generally updated every week, but a few more remote stations may remain out of date for some time. While full of useful information, Whatgas.com does lack deeper functionality – it won’t tell you where the best prices are for fuel in your area, you’ll have to manually look for them yourself.

The app version adds in a lot of this functionality and is available on iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows phone for less than a pound.

Further petrol pricing tips

• Avoid going too far out of your way for small savings
• It’s pointless to think about where it’s cheapest to fill up if you’ve only got 10 miles worth of fuel left to get there – leave about 25 miles at least, 50 for long journeys
• Supermarkets often provide cheap petrol, and offer the convenience of getting petrol with your shopping, as well as  coupon and reward incentives
• Sign up for loyalty schemes, but remember to shop around: reward points rarely cover the differences in cost

Read on to find out more about:

• Buying the most economical vehicle
• Modifying cars to be more fuel efficient
• Measuring miles per gallon

Just ten years ago, fuel efficiency advice would have been limited to the (still perfectly true) facts that:

• Small cars and smaller engines have better fuel efficiency than bigger cars and bigger engines
• Diesel engines are more fuel efficient than petrol

However, fuel efficiency is now sufficiently important that car adverts and showrooms make MPG more visible. They also offer alternative ratings that can inform your purchase of the most economical car or van on the market.

• A simple ‘band A’ to ‘band G’ fuel rating, accompanied by expected road tax rates will be displayed on most new models
• You should always read and compare specifications for MPG ratings – always ensure that the specifications are specific to the precise model you are shopping for (two identical looking vehicles can sometimes have very different specifications)
• The internet provides everything you need to find out the facts about fuel economy: carfueldata.direct.gov.uk is a government run starting point.

Of course, the most ‘fuel efficient’ vehicles on the market currently are those that are not using petrol at all or at least only partly using petrol. Electric and hybrid vehicles are providing a far cheaper way of filling up. However, it’s open for debate whether it is actually cheaper to own one of these vehicles when all of the costs of running them are taken into consideration: purchase prices still remain high.

The thought of investing in a new car just for the sake of fuel efficiency is probably not an appealing one for the majority. It’s certainly something you want to consider every time you do buy, but in the middle of your car’s life, you’re probably not going to ditch it for the efficiency savings you could be making.

As we’ve established, changes in habits could make a real difference. But are there any short-term investments you could be making in your current vehicle lease hire? There are three principal changes you can make to an existing vehicle to make it more efficient, at least in theory.

Modifying aerodynamics would involve adding air dams, wheel arch gap fillers, wheel skirts, grill blocks and even adding dramatic boat tails. The trouble with this is that a large number of modifications on the market are purely for looks. Spoilers, for instance, almost universally make cars less aerodynamic, despite making your vehicle look sportier. Taking aerodynamic design into your own hands means going against the already well researched design choices made by your manufacturer, not to mention the basic aesthetics.

Under the bonnet you could take the extreme step of converting to electric or hybrid power. However, while kits are available you’ll need to be a competent motor mechanic to even consider embarking on what is essentially an enthusiast’s project. There are companies that will do the conversion for you, but it would be a stretch to say that paying for them is economically logical. If you want better performance from a car you intend to maintain and drive for decades to come, a conversion may make sense. Otherwise, the main reason for such a dramatic upgrade is to do your bit for the environment.

Assuming you don’t already have cruise control on your car, this is the one modification you can make that is a guaranteed saving. Maintaining a steady speed is more efficient than hovering around that speed, though you could see similar benefits from changing the way you drive (see above).

You can find a summary of how to save money on petrol on our official Slideshare here.