Travel Tassie: The Fuel Situation

Consider this post an extension of my last post about fuel, on the drive from Sydney to Uluru and the Flinders :) - you can find this post here.

If I keep track of fuel on every trip we do around Australia, eventually a more comprehensive guide to fuel costs around Australia will exist!

So. How much should you budget for fuel for a 21 day trip (18 days in Tassie), starting and ending in Sydney?

The short answer: 5303km used 1030.77 litres of fuel, which cost us $1591.20. We got around 19.4L per 100km on this trip, which is really not efficient!

I would put this down to the fact that the roads in Tasmania vary greatly.  You have your A and B roads, which are pretty much all sealed, but are not straight highways for hours - lots of them are super windy mountain roads.  The C roads are then a bit of a free for all.  It might be sealed, it might be gravel.  It might go from sealed to gravel and back again so many times you can't keep up.  These roads can also be really windy and harder to drive.  Certainly not the super straight never-ending highways we drove in Uluru (where we were getting 13L/100km).

As with our last trip, there are so many variables here. Are you travelling the same roads as us? Is it really hot?  or really cold?  What model car do you have? How loaded up is your car? Is your vehicle running optimally? How are petrol prices at the moment? I could go on.

At the time of travel, the prices at each of these looked like the below.

June-July 2018; there were no public holidays at the time of travel, and we did not travel in school holidays.

(all prices in cents)
M4 Caltex: 157.9
Dog on a Tuckerbox Shell: 153.9
United Preston: 134.9
(Tasmania)
La Trobe/Wattle Hill Caltex: 156.9
Scottsdale Shell: 152.7
United St Helens: 156.9
Murdunna Roadhouse: 154.9
BP Margate: 157.9
Caltex New Norfolk: 159.9
Great Lake General Store: 165.7
Caltex Derwent Bridge: 154.9
BP Strahan: 156.9
United Sheffield: 156.9
Rocky Cape Roadhouse: 149.9
(Mainland)
Tarneit BP: 142.9
Wodonga Caltex: 149.9
BP Marulan: 147.9

So our cheapest fuel was on the whole journey was in Preston, Victoria. The cheapest fuel in Tasmania was in Rocky Cape, which is up on the north coast between Burnie and Stanley. The most expensive was the Great Lake General Store - this is in the centre of Tassie, with nothing around, so it follows the pattern that the more rural you get, the more expensive fuel is.

With 17 fuel stops, the average price of fuel was 153.53c. The price of fuel around Australia jumps up and down randomly all the time - at the time we travelled, even Sydney prices were up around the 150 mark - but this is a fairly good average to budget with, expecting it to be a touch less in large cities, and more in remote towns.

And that's it; I hope this comes in handy when planning your trip around Australia (and especially Tasmania).

Join me next week when I chat about the wildlife we saw.

Hx