over the weekend i saw my first petrol station (an esso garage on the coast road north of whitley bay) advertising liquid petroleum gas for sale on it’s big price sign. it was 40p a litre cheaper than unleaded fuel.

according to the spongecars site it costs about £1500 to convert a car to dual fuel and you get about 75% of the mileage when running on lpg that you would from petrol.

my little baby micra does around 12 000 miles each year at about 9 miles to the litre, that’s 1330 litres of unleaded petrol that cost me about £1000 at the current price of 76 pence per litre. so if i converted it to run on lpg i’d use up a third more litres of fuel to go the same distance, that’s about 1770 litres of lpg. but that would only cost me about £650 at around 36 pence per litre. therefore i’d save about £350 on fuel in the course of a year and it would take me about four and a quarter years, or 51 000 miles to recoup the cost of the conversion.

and said little baby micra, although just over five years old, has just about that many miles on it’s clock at the moment. so if it had been converted to dual fuel when new it would just be at breaking even point now.

i’m not sure what the moral of this tale is. the calculations estimate that it wouldn’t have been worth me converting it to lpg when i bought it, given the two facts that the car had 15 000 on the clock when i bought it as an 18 month old model, and that i’m planning on trading it in for something swisher, snazzier and flashier within a few months. i feel it ought to be worth it though. there’s no way to calculate the price of feeling good or the price of feeling smug at buying cheaper fuel than everyone else even though you took a hit to be able to do that. i expect however if my car cost half as much to run, i’d just drive it twice as far!