Gas Prices in Ireland

Check www.viamichelin.com. There you can set your proposed routes and see fuel costs for each leg. In a 6 day trip, though, you won't have to fill up more than a time or two - the cars there get much better mileage than they do here.

OK, Nancy. I've used ViaMichelin to estimate fuel cost from point to point, but I always have to put in the cost of fuel (€/l) myself. Is there a place where ViaMichelin gives the current cost of fuel/liter?

Steve, thanks, but, for me, I'll never go to Ireland. Do you know how to find the cost/liter for the the continent? Every time I search I get prices from years ago.

Thanks for these tips. I'll look up these websites.

Steve, thanks, that's exactly what I needed. Interestingly, Germany is €1.31/liter. About what I had input to ViaMichelin.

further to Steve's post you may want to specify "US gallons" in the Google search. If you don't specify which flavour of gallon Google takes a guess from your location, fine if you are searching in the US, but if you are checking up when in Ireland it might default to Imperial gallons.

The above postings have fallacies and require unnecessary number crunching. Ex: Steve's chart has prices for premium (98 oct rating), while nearly all cars require only 95 oct). Averages are averages: we find that, on the freeways, one service center may charge fifteen percent more than the next, and different places across any city have a similar split; therefore, with a little care you can easily beat the average and, conversely.....I used to routinely check prices for France and found that some areas (just like in the SE USA) have prices lower than, say, CA or NY. Since I drive into a place like Paris and park for the duration (and thus leave with the same tank with which I arrive) those prices don't concern me. Similarly, the 20% difference between US gal and imp gal (or the 10% diff twixt 4 liters and 1 gal) are inconsequential when trying to compute (without a stubby pencil) the cost of the gas for the miles driven by the average tourist.

Here's the easy way to think about it: gas costs twice as much in europe than it does at home and the average car you rent there gets twice the mileage as yours (disregard if you drive either a hummer or a prius) so the cost per mile is roughtly the SAME.

Here's why: it's typical for us is to drive three thousand miles on a trip (which is probably extreme for most folks). Assuming that the car gets 40 mpg, that's 75 gal; if my rough calculation is off by 10%, that's 7.5 gal, or maybe $40. On a three-week trip, that less than $2 per day. We don't even figure our coffee allowance that closely.

Viamichelin is good for toll road costs. Being what Herself describes as OC-tending-toward-anal, I make a fairly comprehensive day-by-day cost estimate for a trip and then, at the end, see how close we came to the mark. I hit the gas costs pretty close, but always missed on the wrong side for toll costs until I discoverd this nifty site.

To estimate miles, I google-map and add 10% for the inevitable driving in circles.

Lee and all: You can get a pretty good and up-to-date overview of European gas prices at www.benzinpreis.de...

To add to Ed's post about octane, this is one thing you need to be careful about when comparing the octane value at the pump between the US and Europe. There are different ways of measuring the octane of petrol. Most of the world uses the "Research Octane Number" or RON measure; the US and Canada use a different measure, the "Anti-Knock Index" (AKI).

For a particular fuel the RON and AKI values will differ by 4 or 5 octane with the AKI value being the lowest. This means that the gas in Europe might look a higher octane, our regular is 91-ish with Premium being between 95-98 but in "American" the numbers are nearer 87 or 90-93.

Again you have similar issues with published MPG, the official European figures are published in km/L but they often give an MPG value as well. This is almost always Miles per Imperial Gallon, out gallons are 20% bigger than American ones so the MPG always looks a lot better (at least 20%!). You can usually find km/L values for American cars (or convert via google) so for a fair comparison these are the figure to use.