Why Queue For Discount Petrol When You Can Drive On Sunshine?

You have to hand it to the fossil fuel disinformation machine; they’ve done an amazing job of keeping people poor in many senses of the word. Driving through Adelaide recently, I caught sight of another mind-boggling example and thought I’d capture it for posterity – Australians stuck in a huge queue for discounted fuel.

Australians are cheap – they’ll waste hours lining up around the block for a small discount on petrol.

However, when fuel is well over $2/litre, and I tell them my EV does less than $3 per hundred kilometres, the reality sets in. No amount of range anxiety, hyperbolic fire risk or lies about battery life will stop the transition to electric transport.

Hundreds Of Metres Of Car Culture

I was sadly unsurprised to see a newly rebranded petrol station was attracting 375+ miserable metres of crawling cars on the side of Daws Road. Seems if you pay a $100 subscription (and there was a special introductory offer of $50 bonus fuel) you’ll get a better than average discount going forward. Based on prices at the time of writing, you’ll save maybe 15c/litre on petrol or 30c/litre on diesel using this single suburban station.

For someone earning $25/hr on the minimum wage, who is cash poor because of crazy rents and the dismally titled “cost of living crisis”, I understand why you’d be out to save $8 putting 40 litres in a Corolla.

For others who are time poor, yet can afford a LandCruiser with 125 litre fuel tank, I can’t quite figure out why you’d spend an hour for maybe $25 benefit, minus the fuel spent idling in a queue.

Despite the dangers of lining up 30 cars on the side of a busy road, it seems we’re caught in a weird kind of Stockholm Syndrome – we’ll engage in the self-flagellation of sitting in traffic, so long as we think we’re sticking it to the man. Perhaps it’s just a leftover from being an English colony – we like forming orderly queues and have a stiff upper lip when approaching the cash register.

The thing I find really curious is that we hate the faceless corporations fleecing us, but when one billionaire in Adrian Portelli puts his face to discounting, suddenly Australians are proud to throw their money at him (even after he complained about Australian taxes and relocated his business offshore).

Seems we’re all time poor these days, but I really wonder about people’s sanity sometimes, when you’re going to work just so you can buy fuel it’s not conducive to good mental health.

The head of the queue was marshalled by a traffic controller, but I find it ironic that 30-plus passengers stretched for hundreds of metres, when all of them could be condensed into one vehicle at that bus stop.

Viva La Revolution

This sort of time-wasting malarky should soon be a thing of the past, because petrol for transport is going the same way as oil for space heating did, after the last significant oil shock.

EVs are now around 25% of new vehicle sales without the direct subsidies dual-cab utes get. Tesla alone is looking to shift 10,000 cars a quarter. In any case we need to get cracking with more EV chargers, everywhere. It is even happening with diesel vehicles.

It remains to be seen how the legacy markets will hold up – if competition will drive prices down in the short term before the infrastructure costs for petrol, per litre sold, begin to mount up.

Change Is Nothing New

Here in a city that holds one of the world’s biggest veteran, vintage and classic motoring events, in a state with one of the oldest average car fleets, there’s some bravado amongst petrol heads who love V8s and proclaim diesel will never die. But 125 years ago, steam was the established technology, while infernal combustion was the noisy, smelly, difficult, unreliable upstart.

EVs weren’t uncommon, despite the performance of lead-acid batteries. They were simpler, more civilised, easy to operate & started reliably. Sound familiar? What really limited them back then was the lack of electricity beyond city centers. The country expedition range of a circa 1901 EV was halved because you had to get home, whereas an intrepid motorist could have fuel dumps of petrol sent in advance using rail freight or horse-drawn drays.

As a student of motoring history, this enthusiast is just interested to see how fast the collapse of traditional fuels will happen. At least we’ll still be able to get methanol for short bursts of fun, I trust.

There are no petrol refineries out bush, you know.

How Cheap Are We Talking?

My Dad’s latest electricity bill was a $600 shocker. Despite 38kW of rooftop solar, his feed-in tariff had fallen to 0.02c/kWh, which is the kind of rate I understand drives people to despair, but then drives them to an EV dealer – where they can get much better value for their solar by using it to power their car. Giving up less than one-third of a cent on his electricity account, Dad will now power Irene the iMiev for 0.29c/100km.

If you’re not already driving an EV, it’s time to crunch the numbers on your own circumstances.

We’ve just released a new EV charging cost calculator that lets you compare the fuel cost of any petrol car against an EV, allowing you to adjust for how much charging you’ll do when the sun is shining, or if you have an electricity plan with free hours of power. Give the EV charging calculator a crack yourself – it’ll be time better spent than queuing up for slightly discounted petrol.