El Pee Gee

The Hyden road trip, apart from ticking off a few of WA's hot spots, was a great way to test out the new vehicle in its more natural environment and see for myself how it performs.

Clearly theres alot more room in it than any other car we've had (probably combined) but I was interested to know how the LPG economy performed and how quickly it was going to start putting cash back into my wallet. While I didnt pay for the conversion myself, when looking at cars over the last few months it was a strong consideration if our choice wasnt on 'Dual Fuel'. Conversion prices ranged anywhere from $1500 to $2500 depending on injection and additional auto cutover components etc and after speaking to a mob in Balcatta, they reckon our car cost about $1700 to convert.

Yesterday I entered our entire trip into Google Maps which plotted our course from the petrol station I filled up at to each town and I stopped it about where the gas ran out. Apparently I drove 365kms on LPG when I had to flick over to petrol. I used petrol the whole way back to Perth and filled both tanks from the same petrol station when we got close to home. Here are the stats:

There (Warwick -> York -> Wave Rock)
365kms, 62L used, 16L/100kms
Cost $32 = $8.76/100kms

Back (Wave Rock -> Beverley -> Mundaring Weir -> Warwick)
396kms, 57L used, 14L/100kms
Cost $72 = $18.18/100kms

So in summary, it cost me $40 extra to drive back and we only went 30kms further. Also factor in that this was a long drive with extensive time at a relatively low rpm. As its our non-primary car lets assume we do 10000kms a year in it and we're saving roughly $10 per 100kms - thats math even I can do! 1 fat Magilla Gorilla per year.
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