My cars: average fuel cost feature?

[Mr Whippy]

Since fuel costs have gone haywire, choosing a decent fuel cost average is getting hard work as I don't 'store' data anywhere else to reference and average from.

Is it possible to have some kind of average UK fuel price as a reference over time (assuming our mileage has been constant over the ownership period to divvy the cost out over), and so give an accurate representation of actual cost?


Ie, car owned two years, 30,000 miles, thats 1250miles/month, month 01 avg fuel cost = 80p, month 02 = 81p etc etc etc, to calc totals?


Just curious, because right now my chosen average fuel cost figure is just plucked from thin air at 110p average over the last 25 months!?


Thanks

Dave

[mmm-five]

I'm just doing an average based on how much it was when I bought the car and how much it is now, so petrol was 92p when I bought my car last May and is 115p now, so an average of 103.5p - although the longer you have the car the harder it will be to accurately remember how much the fuel was when you bought it.

[Mr Whippy]

That kinda works, but it's not really been linear in rise.

I've aimed kinda middle ground for now though like you have

Would be nice to have the Pistonheads hamsters whirring away in the background have a database of average UK fuel prices (wouldn't be that big), and just populate our cost for us assuming a flat mileage covered vs time rate

Dave

[mmm-five]

I suppose in an ideal world we'd put an entry every time we filled up so that PH could track our exact price & fuel usage. Don't fancy entering my details 2-3 times a week though.

[Mr Whippy]

Nah, I'm too lazy for all that jazz.

Hence me wanting PH to do an average for me

Dave

[RacingPete]

This will be a bit of a change to how it works now as the system will not know how many miles the car has done in each year or month. Thus if you drove 10,000 miles in year 1; 30,000 in year 2; and 5,000 in year 3 it would result in a different cost to someone who did the same miles each year. Thus the system would have to be changed so you wrote your mileage per month/year and then the average for that month could be applied (with super, diesel and LPG equivalents too).

I have put it on the list for when we do an overhaul of that section to think about.

[Mr Whippy]

Yep, that is the secondary issue. However, we manually update the covered mileage (total miles on car) ourselves anyway, so if you could record that value in the database, and reference it as how mileage changes with time rather than a single lump value over the ownership period as we have now.

I know it's complex so don't worry if it isn't workable. Ideally I'd have a database with my own mileage/fuel bought on, but it's just a hassle and who expected prices to rise so much for it to matter that much?

It'd just be nice to have some feature or tool to calculate the average over a given period maybe, because I find the 'owners car' feature here great to keep a track of costs

Dave