I went to fill up yesterday, which i rarely do as the other half takes the car to work, and i noticed that diesel is the same price as petrol at the moment. Anyone know why?
Is Diesel normally more expensive than pertol in your area? Because that would be the most logical if they are the same price now. if that is the case, the reason is: The demand for diesel-fuel has been reduced because of the global financial situation, there are less transport going on, and therefore the demand has been reduced, and as a result, prices go down to make people buy more of it. and at the same time, demand for petrol allways increases in the summertime, people like to cruise around in there cars in the summertime, and as a result, they can take a higher price, and still sell the same amount of petrol.
American summer driving season. As Alekoy says demand for petrol goes up in the summer mainly due to our cousins across the atlantic getting in there cars and randomly driving around for thousands of miles. Diesel (well gasoil) is used as heating fuel in Germany and other areas around north west Europe so its price fluctuates seasonally also. Important thing to remember Europe is heavily deficit Diesel and as such imports it, so we effectily set the price for Diesel around the world. America is hugely deficit Petrol so it sets the price of the Gasoline world wide due to European refiners exporting to the market where they can get the best price. Excuse the very broad strokes but that's effectively the picture.
Im not entirely sure but (just an example) if petrol was 90p, diesel was £1.00 The idea being that the governemt tax more on diesel because diesel cars use less fuel etc so it evens the running costs out on average across the board. Now the governemt want to reduce immisions so the best way to do that is to drop diesel by a few pence and bring petrol up to the same and in some cases more (scunthorpe area). This will then in theory force people to re consider buying a petrol car and thus moving over to diesel. The governments theory here is your carbon footprint will decrease. Diesel used to be a dirty nasty horrid fuel of satan so it remained at a VERY highly taxed price. The tables have no turned and petrol is now the dirty satan fuel. To make matters worse it costs more to make petrol so when they were selling it at less than diesel the margins were massively less. I can see cars being moved over to diesel only in the next 15 years or so with the obvious introduction of more hybrid or full electric "clean" powered cars. Andy
The trouble is that quite large segments of the car market are more efficient in the real world with petrol rather than diesel engines. Anything fairly small with a small diesel engine tends to need thrashing to get up to speed, ruining the economy of an already heavier car.
Diesel until the last few years has always been historically cheaper, but i assume that was due to lack of demand. It was only after i bought a diesel car a few years ago the price went higher than petrol so its nice to see it come back to the same price. Last year i was tempted to trade the diesel for a petrol car as i'm sure the extra MPG gained by using diesel was not worth the higher fuel cost.
My 1.4 diesel from 2002 in a pug 206 can still get 630 miles from £50 in the tank, and the car hasn't been treated that well.....
My new diesel has double the power, 3x the torque and weighs 400Kg more than my old petrol hatchback but I'm getting 40-50% better mileage pottering around in traffic and double on the motorway. It can go either way of course, but I most of the newest diesel and petrol engine designs are pretty impressive. I think it all falls down when someone buys a diesel just because its a diesel, so of course its going to get better mileage, without putting too much thought into running it in the real world. (Don't even get me started on hybrids)
