So there you are, stopping off at the petrol station to top up the tank of your good old family Toyota . Like most people, you’ll roll your eyes at the amount that whizzes up on the bowser and remember back in the Good Old Days (I must be getting near middle age if I’m starting to use that phrase) when filling up the tank didn’t cost nearly as much as half a week’s groceries… which is only a slight exaggeration.
And it’s certainly a fact that Australia is a pricey part of the world to buy petrol in, especially premium petrol. In the OECD countries, it’s in the top ten most expensive places to fill the tank with premium. At the end of the December 2012 quarter, the countries in the world where you don’t want to fill up were:
- Spain
- The Netherlands (no wonder bikes are so popular over there)
- Hungary
- Luxembourg
- Slovak Republic
- Australia
- Sweden
- Germany
- Ireland
- Canada
(This list doesn’t take taxes and levies into account – these vary from country to country and make true comparisons a bit harder. It just looks at the actual stuff your car burns.)
What about regular or non-premium? Things look a little bit different for Australia here, thankfully. In fact, we’re the country with the third biggest gap between the price of regular and premium, with Canada and Mexico having bigger gaps (the smallest gaps between premium and regular are in Germany and New Zealand). A lot of countries don’t have regular petrol, either, and are stuck with premium – and this includes the poor old Spanish and Dutch. The worst places for regular petrol are:
- Denmark
- Germany
- Czech Republic
- Austria
- New Zealand
There’s always diesel, of course. Again considering the plain price of the fuel rather than anything with any taxes or levies shoved onto it, Australia comes out very well indeed. Here’s where you can get the fourth cheapest diesel prices in the OECD – only beaten by New Zealand, the USA and Mexico. The places where diesel was priciest were:
- Turkey
- Norway
- The UK
- Italy
- Sweden
- Ireland
- Finland
- Hungary
- Germany
- Denmark
You might ask where the cheapest places are in the OECD are. Well, the graphs I found with these fascinating figures only had room for 24 countries so they went for the most expensive 24 in each category. However, the following seem to be good places to fill your tank:
Premium petrol: USA, UK, Austria
Regular petrol: Mexico, USA, Canada
Diesel: Mexico, USA, New Zealand (although the Kiwis clap a whopping big tax on diesel).
The moral here seems to be that driving the way they do in American movies is a really bad idea.
And spare a wee thought for our trans-Tasman rivals. At one point this year, their government was considering increasing the per-litre tax clapped on petrol on the grounds that the public had changed their fuel consumption habits (buying cars with smaller engines like Suzuki Swifts or looking out for hybrid vehicles like the Nissan LEAF, etc.) and The Powers That Be weren’t getting enough revenue from petrol tax as a result. Not sure if this bit of lunacy went through or not in the end – lobby groups didn’t half kick up a stink – but here’s hoping that our government won’t get funny ideas as well.