Whitey
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Hey all,
There’s been some intense debate over the years with the Petrol vs Diesel argument.
Typically there isn’t much in the way of hard number crunching, so I thought it would be interesting to compare the running costs over a 10 year period based on historical pump prices.
The pump prices have been sourced from the Australian Institute of Petroleum, and are the average national price for each calendar year. As it is an average over a calendar year, it is statistically “washed out” a bit, or a bit on the data poor side. However, I don’t believe it will change things much if you broke the price down to a month by month average.
The plot below shows the national average pump price from 2004-2014.
What is interesting about this plot is that while diesel is historically always more expensive than ULP, as you’ll see below, the difference in running cost is getting wider, meaning diesel is closing the gap.
The next plot showing cost/year is created by assuming values for fuel economy and an average weekly driving distance. For this I have chosen 300km/week, or 15600km/year, or 156000km, which is what my Prado has on it after 10 years. For the diesel I’ve used 11litres/100km and 17litres/100km for the petrol.
You can of course change these numbers to suit your own particular driving habits, however, for the sake of simplicity and to get the point across, my fuel economy figures reflect a typical daily driver in an urban setting, who has a mix of urban/highway driving.
You can see that the difference has grown from $850 to $1300 over the 10 year period, showing that diesel has closed the gap. The final running costs over this 10 year period are $37071 for the petrol, and $24866 for the diesel.
This is a difference of $12205, or on average a saving of $1220.50/year by running the diesel in an urban setting.
Note that my thread is only about running costs for an urban setting, and doesn’t include arguments about servicing and any other extra costs outside the normal service schedule.
If anyone has accurate figures for the service schedule up to 160,000km, I’d be happy to add the service costs over this 10 year period to widen the discussion. Note that servicing costs can vary dramatically depending on who does the service, so any comparison has to use the same workshop.
Best
Mark
There’s been some intense debate over the years with the Petrol vs Diesel argument.
Typically there isn’t much in the way of hard number crunching, so I thought it would be interesting to compare the running costs over a 10 year period based on historical pump prices.
The pump prices have been sourced from the Australian Institute of Petroleum, and are the average national price for each calendar year. As it is an average over a calendar year, it is statistically “washed out” a bit, or a bit on the data poor side. However, I don’t believe it will change things much if you broke the price down to a month by month average.
The plot below shows the national average pump price from 2004-2014.
What is interesting about this plot is that while diesel is historically always more expensive than ULP, as you’ll see below, the difference in running cost is getting wider, meaning diesel is closing the gap.
The next plot showing cost/year is created by assuming values for fuel economy and an average weekly driving distance. For this I have chosen 300km/week, or 15600km/year, or 156000km, which is what my Prado has on it after 10 years. For the diesel I’ve used 11litres/100km and 17litres/100km for the petrol.
You can of course change these numbers to suit your own particular driving habits, however, for the sake of simplicity and to get the point across, my fuel economy figures reflect a typical daily driver in an urban setting, who has a mix of urban/highway driving.
You can see that the difference has grown from $850 to $1300 over the 10 year period, showing that diesel has closed the gap. The final running costs over this 10 year period are $37071 for the petrol, and $24866 for the diesel.
This is a difference of $12205, or on average a saving of $1220.50/year by running the diesel in an urban setting.
Note that my thread is only about running costs for an urban setting, and doesn’t include arguments about servicing and any other extra costs outside the normal service schedule.
If anyone has accurate figures for the service schedule up to 160,000km, I’d be happy to add the service costs over this 10 year period to widen the discussion. Note that servicing costs can vary dramatically depending on who does the service, so any comparison has to use the same workshop.
Best
Mark
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