It's Highway Robbery, innit

[tim]

So I've been playing around the gub'mint's Fuel Finder API service, got a bit carried away with myself and made a full on fuel-finder website, finding cheap fuel for the purpose of.

It updates every 30 mins. It's quite worrying how many fuel retailers are not reporting according to the legislation, but I'm sure it'll get better over time. Law says they have to update their pricing data within 30 mins of a change. I'm excluding data over a week old at the moment due to the volatility. And also the plebs entering prices in pounds not pence.

I know there's several of these already out there, but I think mine is a nice simple mobile-friendly layout, and it's pretty quick most of the time.

Give it a spin, if you want, or not. Whatevs

https://highwayrobbery.uk

[Marv]

Seems to work well Tim

I usually go to the Esso on the A12 near Capel St Mary because I've found it to be one of the cheapest for fuel. Your site seems to back that up...interesting the next two cheapest are ones I would not have expected. Including a garage run by an old school friend who I haven't spoken to for years.

[DeskJockey]

Nice. Depressing to see that my nearest is 7p/L dearer than the cheapest "nearby". But as that's a 20 mile round-trip, I'll just suck it up. Nowhere near here is cheap either.

[Gavster]

Looks good, also revealed that I paid 12p/l more on a full tank than a station just a couple of miles from where is was. Useful info right now, especially if the strait of Hormuz remains closed much longer.

[duncs500]

Nice job, works well!

[jamcg]

That’s brilliant, happily the petrol station next to my work is one of the cheapest, usually 2nd or 3rd in my lists

[mik]

Works great Tim

Is there any way to filter further? I want SUL, but I don’t want to pay the SUL premium for BP Ultimate (and others) that are only 97RON.

[Mito Man]

Also a lot of them just have the names of the franchise group. Like what brand fuel is MFG or Rontec selling?

[IanF]

Clever.. BMW displays the price of the recommended fuel type for your car on the BMW Sat Nav when you have 50 miles range remaining, (their website says these are also updated every 30mins), so I just look for Shell/Tesco near my route. Good name though!

[tim]

Also a lot of them just have the names of the franchise group. Like what brand fuel is MFG or Rontec selling?

Yeah brand name is a field. I'm trying to make this as mobile friendly as possible so don't want to make each block too big. I'll see if I can jam it in tho. Some of the data in name/address fields is complete shite tho.

[mr_jon]

Currently down, Tim? Does nothing atm.

[tim]

it might be asleep. If you get a 20 second wait for results it's because the container has gone to sleep 15 mins after the last request. It's not cheap to host and makes no money so don't need it always-on

[nuttinnew]

Shell garage in Shrewsbury. Ironically on Thieves Lane you can say that again

[Mito Man]

And the V Powah will be 15-20p more. According to the Caterham tuner makes a tiny bit less power than Tesco 99 so save your money.

[Rich B]

Diesel in Belgium is €2.30 a litre most places i’ve seen, so £2+

[Mito Man]

They have almost double the fuel duty that we do. But they justify it by showing that the Netherlands next door have an even higher fuel duty. And the Dutch have gone full climate extremist mode so they’re in for a fun future.

[Simon]

Just tried it for topping up the Yeti. Very good!

May I make a suggestion? For prices that are the same (loads round here are 152.9 for UL), perhaps then default to ordering by distance? So the cheapest, nearest first, then the next second, etc etc. Then go up in price, etc.

[Gavster]

Thought some of you might find this intersting, an article in The Grocer about how forecourts set prices. Worth noting that while The Grocer is a great publication, they do have a tendency to defend business interests on the whole. E.g. saying that forecourts reduce their margins during price rises, when we know that many of them pushed prices up as soon as wholesale prices went up. Also they talk as if the CMA are great at policing this kind of stuff, which really isn't the case.

[GG.]

Made a trip up to see family in Yorkshire over Easter and the nearest Shell to me was 214.9p per litre for V-Power Diesel which equated to £124.08 for three quarters of a tank

[tim]

I've made a few UI tweeks. I'm keeping in mind the vast majority of visitors are on a mobile with a 390x844 screen res.

In each results block the fuel brand is now top left, and station name top right - if they are different. Often it's the same text because hard of thinking or something, who knows. Second line is an address, which is clickable and should navigate you to it (ish - again, hard of thinking entering an address accurately and or stupid Government portal not validating addresses or both). It sends the address and postcode to the map provider as that's all I can do.

if the price last updated is over 7 days ago it shows up in red.

Distance is crow flys (apparently radius is not obvious to some) and not via your favourite route because it's not hosted in your head.

I'm not going to add any more filtering as I think it would just clutter up the screen too much and there's other services you can use if you want to do all that. I'm trying to make this simple quick and moron proof. Two of those things are easier than the 3rd

People on facebook are rude (this is not news).