Friday, June 30, 2006
sans plomb, super, gazoil - none of it is cheap
Owners of Type 2s don't need to be told they are not the most economical of vehicles. 20 miles to the gallon seems to be the average, and that's not even for a fully laden vehicle. Well falling for Eddie Hobbs' rip-off Ireland hype, we assumed that petrol would probably be a bit cheaer in France. How wrong we were. When we left home we were paying about €1.15 a litre but pulled off the ferry to prices of €1.30-€1.40.
Anyone planning to bring a vehicle over here should be aware of a couple of things. All the 24 hour petrol stations you see advertised are actually unmanned outside normal hours (which included early Sunday morning when we arrived). And they don't like Irish credit cards because even though we have PINs, they look for a signature every time we use them. As a result we were running very low on fuel the first day before we found a petrol station with an open shop attached.
The cheapest places to fuel up are the hypermarches - we've been getting it for €1.27 a litre compared to other places advertising up to €1.39. That's quite a difference when you are talking about a €60 tank of petrol every few days. Avoid the stations on the autoroutes if you can - they have a monopoly so not surprising they are a lot more expensive.
Also being a metric country the air pressure is expressed in bar rather than psi, which totally stumped me the first time. Apparently the formula is psi x 0.07 = bar.
Anyone planning to bring a vehicle over here should be aware of a couple of things. All the 24 hour petrol stations you see advertised are actually unmanned outside normal hours (which included early Sunday morning when we arrived). And they don't like Irish credit cards because even though we have PINs, they look for a signature every time we use them. As a result we were running very low on fuel the first day before we found a petrol station with an open shop attached.
The cheapest places to fuel up are the hypermarches - we've been getting it for €1.27 a litre compared to other places advertising up to €1.39. That's quite a difference when you are talking about a €60 tank of petrol every few days. Avoid the stations on the autoroutes if you can - they have a monopoly so not surprising they are a lot more expensive.
Also being a metric country the air pressure is expressed in bar rather than psi, which totally stumped me the first time. Apparently the formula is psi x 0.07 = bar.
