Well, we did it. We spent the entire day yesterday avoiding posting anything about the damn fuel price hike, and we made it. So if you didn’t dash madly out to fill up yesterday, you’ve well and truly bloody missed it already! Twit.

Zwilani and Lavi of Nuffield Caltex adjust the price up 18 cents at 12AM, Wednesday the 3rd of February

We did it to make a point though. It’s about not regurgitating the raw, forced advertising of a massive money-making corporation which can and does fluctuate completely artificially depending on how many billions the men in charge want to take on that specific day or month or year. Advertising for a product which we have to buy and for some reason isn’t allowed to be competitively priced. Yet still has to be driven down our throats on a regular basis for some reason.

The news reports all day have blared the warning, seemingly becoming more dire by the hour, that tomorrow fuel costs a (random amount of cents) more per litre and everyone who’s failed to fill up today is just a wastrel basically who likes to squander money. A twit. At its heart, true, but what’s all the panic? Why push it so damn hard?

Then I got to wondering, How much do the Big Men of fuel get in terms of extra daily sales on a day like today? I bet it’s a lot. I bet it’s a hell of a lot. I bet it’s the kind of amount of money difference in one day, that most of us couldn’t even get to grips with. An obscene amount.

Sure, as I’ve said, we all need fuel, there’s no doubting or denying that fact. So if you fill up today and save a couple of Rands well, you just won’t need for a couple of extra days right? So it isn’t exactly like you’re going to be using any more or anything in the long run.

For us petrolheads it does. See, a full petrol tank is just an open invitation really. There’s only one reason you have that petrol, one purpose that you bought it for and had it pumped into your tank. And it’s not to get you in and out of the office every day, even though perhaps it really is. No.

It’s there to be burned. Gloriously, sensationally, fabulously atomised, squirted, burned and exhausted in a continuing succession of near-perpetual motion without pause or interruption.

When you’re trundling around with a quarter tank and a month-end, Helium wallet in your pocket the sensible brain is able to get it’s word in sideways a little more, but when that needle is on or near that 1/1 mark well it’s just playtime. It just is. The short budget will wait until tomorrow.

So, by not pushing the big shpiel, we actually saved you from wasting your money today on a false sense of financial forethinking! You’d just have caused your turbocharged engine to inhale half a tank tomorrow in one huge gulp, although you’d normally only have used an eighth. Racing other fuel-drunk enthusiasts away from every light, your throttle seldom anything less than 80% open.

Or probably not. Still. And do they really think we still believe as an internet-connected always-on modern society that the hikes are the result of the price of a barrel of Brent Crude in US Dollars? Read our fuel price expose in the next issue of Drive for those sordid details…

Anyway on the bright side, on the same day, NAAMSA posted some truly heartening figures. New vehicles have literally shot off the floor in January 2010, and although as predicted the market wasn’t exactly back to pushing 1-million a year it was definitely also a stronger rally than could be hoped for. And just straight away in the New Year, these figures reflecting the entire month of Jan 2010 versus January 2009, which certainly wasn’t the worst month of last year either!

So there are more cars on the road. So more and more customers of this necessary resource, meaning ever-increasing sales volumes. And fuel gets more expensive? Ah well.

Enjoy ‘em all, we say.

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