I filled my car with petrol today.
Not normally something I’d blog about, but I wanted to write a quick post about mymilemarker.com because I don’t see many people using it.
The idea is fairly simple – a web app that you use to record when you fill your car with petrol, that can then work out useful figures like your average mileage and car’s fuel efficiency.
I came across it because you can update your record from twitter, and any excuse to find another way to use twitter is always good. 🙂
It’s fairly American-ized, so I have to remember to read “miles” everywhere it says “kilometers”. But I quite like it. It’s interesting to see that I do about 9 miles per litre on average, and that if I carry on like I have been in the last few months, I will spend about £390 a year on petrol.
Once they get more users and a bigger store of previous updates behind them, I can see this being a useful information resource. They record the make and model of your car with your updates, so imagine people looking to buy a car being able to see actual real-life fuel efficiency figures for the models of car they are interested in?
I don’t know how far they are from having a database big enough to be able to produce figures with a reasonable degree of statistical reliability, but it’ll be interesting when they do.
Canadian-ized I guess, America use miles to measure distances the same as us.
Although even then you have to be careful, as they use different gallons in the US than they do in the UK, which means that if the same car averaged 40 miles per gallon in the UK, it would only get 33 miles per gallon in the US.
Ah, now there it’s actually fairly clever. In the preferences for your account, you can tell it where you live. It’s not very granular, the closest you can say is “Europe (€)” or “Europe (£)” – but that’s how i can get it to accept prices in pounds and pence. They just don’t seem to realise that the UK doesn’t use kilometres like the rest of Europe.
I also use mymilemarker. it’s such an awesome concept/tool. I really want to see what they’re going to bring out in the next versions.
looks good im gonna start using it, shame about the KMH/MPH situation tho..