"Fuel Prices Why Do we cop it?"

I think they put fricken ritalin or something in the water, Belly. The apathy drives me insane. 'Down the road' there's a servo selling unleaded for a buck 38, but in the next town (10 mins) the servo is selling unleaded (FROM THE SAME TRUCK) for a buck 28....go figure.

I have a solution for 'encouraging' Caltex, BP, and Shell to reassess their current lack of humanity....and basic soul selling money grabbing highway robbery, unfortunately the feds would frown on it and lassooing fundi suicide bombing fruitloops and pointing them in 'that particular direction' would be a logistical pain in the ginger.

“Small cars can have small LPG tanks, city cars do not need 600 klm capacity.”

Do they make small tanks? I don’t think so.

Small cars are not necessarily ‘city cars’. My 1.5 litre Mitsubishi Lancer is the only car I own and it does some long trips.

The car has a 60 litre tank, and that takes me over 600kms without a fill up. Given the poorer litres/100kms of LPG, I would be nuts to convert, even if there was a tank small enough for the boot.

No matter what our cars run on in the future, we can bet that it will continue to cost us big time, thanks to greedy producers and double taxing governments.

The biggest rip off of the present time is the hybrid car, selling for close to $40k and producing an overall economy comparable with a small petrol engine for less than half the price.

With all of the argy bargy going on behind the scenes with governments and oil producers, all we can do is plod along with what we have. It's highly unlikely that most of us will see any practical, cost-effective options to fossil fuel in our lifetimes.

Stop whingeing. Woolworths put the price of chocolate up by 32c a few months ago, overnight, and no-one complained. They are also charging 75cents more for the same loaf of bread than their nearest competitor and no-one is complaing about price gouging and people are still buying heir inflated bread. As I said beer is as much as 10 times the price of petrol and no-one is complaing about price gouging.

Our petrol is CHEAP; it costs billions to find it, pump it, transport it and deliver it to your petrol tank. Just because Oz has been too stupid to develop proper public transport in its cities where live about 80% of the population, doesn't mean that public transport in the cities won't work. If you live in the city, stop using your car to commute to work and lobby for proper public transport. If we all did this, then we could help reduce the demand for hydrocarbon energy and lessen our CO2 footprint, and the price of petrol might even fall so that those in the bush may be able to pay less for their essential fuel.

Henry learn the difference between private competition and a cartel. also, you don't seem to understand the place of oil in the economy.

Come on Henry you can do better than that er can't you?
Our country does not run on chocolate, we do not need it every day and count with me, how many loaves of bread do we eat daily?
My Falcon has that idiot spare wheel, the fuel tank takes up the room it cost near half to run.
It adds little to the balance of payments to fill it.
That supermarket chain charges 69.9 it was 12 cents cheaper just months ago.
Country town up the road? 79.9! just a bit more? 82.6!
We see some who fill once a week, some once a day, but it costs us in everything we buy the too high price of fuel.
Transport costs get us every time in every item we buy.
Why do we cop it? we just do not understand the real costs are much more than the fuel in our tank.
And our apathy or let some one else fix it lets politicians fill that tax bucket with our dollars and claim it is good management.
We each subsidies oil because to find another fuel would destroy that industry.

Belly & others;
Consider this information which is easily confirmed.

All oil companies except Total have produced less product each year
that the previous year for the last few years.
They have increased their expenditure on search and discovery.
They have not found very much oil considering the enormous expenditure
involved in search and development.

I have no axe to grind for the oil companies but these are the facts
and we are in for a lot more of the same.

It is no coincidence that Sydney and Melbourne public transport is now
bursting at the seams. There are now millions per year extra public
transport journies. In country areas it is still probably cheaper
to have private transport rather than public transport.

LPG will have to be used more in Australia, but it should be produced
from natural gas not oil as is done in some refineries.
I have seen conflicting figures for Australian oil production.
The ABARE web site says Australian oil production went up in the last
year but other figures say our production is decreasing by 8 % per year.
It is possible both figures are correct. It is just a matter of the
time scale used.
No matter what we will be importing 99% of our oil in about 7 years
if we keep burning it at the present rate.

If I needed a long range driving car I would look at the small European diesels.
I believe they get remarkable milage.
Then you could run them on vegetable oil.
Did you see the story in the UK where the supermarkets ran out of
vegetable oil on their shelves because it was cheaper than diesel at the pump ?

What it all means is that you are going to pay a lot more and you had better be grateful.
It is still better than walking.