Comments on: Current Fuel Prices On Your GPS

By: Tim

Tim — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 11:30:00 +0000

That is really interesting, Stephen. I didn’t know that.

By: Stephen

Stephen — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 01:46:56 +0000

Too bad we don’t have this feature available for Australian GPS units. In Western Australia (where I’m from)The State Government introduced a program called Fuel watch. The State provides a free Website http://www.fuelwatch.wa.gov.au/
Where Fuel stations Submit Their pricing data no later than 4pm the day before the prices take effect. once the prices have been updated, the stations have to maintain that price for the entire day. It’s a great service, offering email and on demand sms updates if you set up your own profile. The best part is, before you leave for home at the end of the day, you know who is cheaper & wether to fill up today or tommorrow.

By: chris_glos

chris_glos — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:19:14 +0000

Have same problem in UK making this an almost useless service. Much better to use the websites (petrolprices.com in the UK) which seem to have accurate and up to date prices.

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:11:17 +0000

Neal, you saw where a station can sign up for inclusion, but the gas stations don’t report their own prices. Instead, OPIS is taking data from live credit card transactions from fleet management companies. So when a commercial vehicle (think companies like UPS, FedEx, etc) purchases gas and uses their corporate card, the date/time, grade, and $/gal information gets transmitted to OPIS. So the service is automatic, and doesn’t allow the station owner to cheat. The station owners need to sign up for inclusion– but they are not reporting the data themselves.

By: Neal Pressley

Neal Pressley — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:04:04 +0000

I went to website http://opisnet.com/retail/pricelink.asp to understand how do they collect the data. Looks like they have free service where a gas station can freely update thier gas prices. I am wondering if the gas prices are reported by the gas stations, there are chances they will report a lower price so that they get more customers. Again, if they do not do that, if there is a raise in price, they may avoid to publish that and keep the older data. Does OPIS make sure that the gas station do not report wrong data?

There is other site http://www.gasbuddy.com/ which works on the basis of the price reported by the consumers. The best will be a mechanishm on OPIS site where both consumer and gas station can keep updating data and they average out the data and display. If OPIS has not option to receive data from consumers, they may need some kind of link with Gas Buddy site. If we are averaging the data received from many sources, then even one or few erroneous entry will not have much result.

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:46:51 +0000

TomTom's FAQ (here) says this:

60% of Stations will report Regular Fuel price updates every 48 hours.

I can confirm through data analysis that the prices are updated much more often than 14 days, however it is possible for some stations to not be updated for up to 14 days. The stations on my road for example are often updated more than once per day. I'm not suggesting by any means you should keep the service, but my experience with the service has been quite good.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:27:06 +0000

I just got off the phone with TomTom. The support tech says that the fuel prices are only updated every 14 days, which essentially makes the service useless. I’ve asked for my money back.

By: Jeff Blume

Jeff Blume — Sun, 25 May 2008 02:29:31 +0000

I signed up for TomTom fuel prices at a cost of $14.95 per year. We went on a 45 min road trip and stopped at two gas stations that TomTom reported as the lowest price. One was a Citgo station that TomTom reported as $3.52 (regular), which was incredible since our local Murphy gas station was going for $3.72. When we hit the Citgo it was actually $3.79 – 27 cents more than TomTom stated! Also, it wasn’t even the cheapest. We saw an Exxon priced at $3.71 as we were driving. We gave it another shot and we ended up at a RaceWay that TomTom stated was going to $3.60. It was $3.74. Overall, the TomTom fuel prices service does not scan and report the gas station prices anywhere near fast enough to make this service work correctly. I would not recommend it.