Food for Thought

It strikes me, as a guy who is at the sharp end of selling LPG equipment that there are as many reasons to put an LPG conversion on your car as not, and in this financial climate the choices are increasingly difficult to reconcile.

On the one hand, the savings are obvious and the benefits to the environment are unquestionable. But on the other hand, can I afford to outlay around £1350 on an LPG conversion. The fact that you are even reading this indicates which way you are leaning, but if you need a few more thoughts to help you to decide, read on.

"Its not the occasional big wave of water that sinks most ships, but the steady, continuous leaks, over time, that drain the ability to float"

In financial terms the above analogy is simple, we all know that owning and running a vehicle is a money pit, but we all have to get to work, socialise, shop, school run or go on holiday, and buses just aren't the answer and electric cars are literally years away from being practical. So for the foreseeable future the money pit is here to stay.

All around you there are things that drain your financial resources, and your personal transport can be a major contributor, to my mind its the weekly spend that effects you the most, so reducing that can clearly be most beneficial.

"Our attempts to make our weekly spend less painful have germinated a culture of loans and mortgages that allow us all to spread out the pain to a bearable limit."

Which is why I advocate having your car running on Autogas / LPG, once the conversion is up and running, your weekly spend immediately comes down. FACT.

Take a typical conversion of say £1350 and a vehicle that consumes £40 of petrol a week, after the initial outlay you should have around an extra £75 a month in your pocket, a useful sum, and in some cases £40 fuel spend a week is small fry. Only recently I was listening to a customer complaining that he was paying £90 a week to fill his tank with petrol and getting only 300 miles from it! Now that's what I call a money pit!

Look at our example in another way, if you were to take out a loan of £1350 over 2 years at 8% interest, you would be making repayments of about £15.25 a week on that loan, But once your £40 a week petrol car is converted and running on LPG, your weekly savings on fuel costs would be around £18 a week. A small saving on your weekly outlay that would turn into much larger savings once the loan was re payed. Not an ideal solution, but possibly another angle to at least consider if you really must have LPG.

In conclusion
I dearly want you to install e-G@S on your car, but, if not e-G@S, I would rather you found good service, good warranty backup and quality in the kit you finally plump for, and ultimately, be happy with LPG and its obvious benefits, there are other companies out there that offer this, but they are few and far between, so do your homework and make double sure you don't find yourself with one of the kits that are flooding the market at the moment, that magically turn into a paper weight when Mr Cheap Kit installer isn't there anymore and you need spares or support.

And Finally, back to our quiz