| 
LPG helps reduce your car running costs
By Chris Ray, MoneyHighStreet.com. Published
on June 17, 2008
Rising oil prices are making all of us think about cutting
our expenditure on oil related products. It seems an increasing
number of people are turning to LPG (Liquid Petroleum Gas)
to reduce their motoring costs.
LPG is an oil based gas that exists in liquid
form, but as it burns in a much cleaner way than petrol or
diesel,
it has many environmental benefits.
Being greener than unleaded or diesel,
LPG use is being encouraged by the government, who charge
less tax on LPG than either
petrol or diesel.
In fact LPG is taxed at only 16.5p per litre whereas diesel
costs include a 64p tax charge per litre. This difference
in taxation means that LPG costs around half that of unleaded
or diesel.
Although LPG prices have been rising
with the higher oil costs, LPG currently costs around 65p
per litre, compared to £1.30 for diesel.
So it is not surprising that in a recent survey, MotorInsurance.co.uk
found that one in four motorists want to convert their cars
to LPG.
It seems large organisations are seeing the benefits of
converting their fleets to run on LPG. For example, Alan
Hocking, Fleet and Supplies Manager at Humberside Police
comments that using LPG is helping to reduce the cost of
keeping the local community safe as well as tackling climate
change.
“We made the move for environmental
reasons and the reduction in fuel costs is an additional
benefit. Everypenny
that we save from the budget can go directly to supporting
front-line policing for the community”, he says.
The main problem with converting your car
to run on LPG is that it can be difficult to find a filling
station that
supplies Liquid Petroleum Gas. This is why the research found
that 20% of people would switch to LPG as long as their car
could also run on unleaded or diesel, if no LPG was available.
The dread of running out of fuel with no
LPG supplier in the area is creating a huge barrier to the
take up of this
fuel, even though there are significant environmental and
cost saving benefits.
It seems, however that there is a misconception
about the poor availability of LPG. I entered our nearest
town (Chelmsford)
in this LPG locator and found 11 petrol stations supplying
LPG. When I searched for LPG suppliers in a rural
town, Swaffham in Norfolk, 3 stations were found to supply
the fuel. Polperro
in Cornwall, a small tourist destination, also has three
LPG suppliers in the vicinity.
Rural LPG outlets are often
in supermarkets to which most of the locals have to travel
anyway, so there is little inconvenience
in using LPG, even for rural communities.
Converting to LPG does require modifications
to your car, however now that insurance companies are more
willing to
insure professionally converted vehicles, now may well be
the time to help your wallet and the environment by switching
to LPG too.
Kier has launched a new fleet of low-pollution
vans powered by clean-burning alternative fuel to deliver
housing maintenance services for tenants of Hammersmith & Fulham
Homes in the London Borough of
Hammersmith and Fulham.
|
