Hi all,
With the petrol prices showing no inclination of coming down, I am just wondering if it is worth adding the duel fuel option to the car. I understand that there will be a loss of boot space, but is it worth it overall?
Are there any disadvantages to it?
Why do you always reply to the first poster in a thread?
@HeWhoKnows: No you aren't. You are answering ops questions, but replying to me for some reason. You always do it.
@serpserpserp: Correct, the dood can say what he wants but he does it purely to ride on the coattail of the first comment regardless if its relevant or not.
It's the unfortunate reality of OzB's approach to comment sorting. Top 3-5 comments get the most attention. Yeah sneaky of the guy to try and work around it in this way, but maybe if OzB made it easy to change sorting to popular/controversial, etc like other platforms this would be less of an issue.
singularly amazing
This would have been a great question in 1996.
I worked in a petrol station ~2000, if I had a dollar for every ford falcon AU owner who talked about how much money they saved switching to gas I could have retired at 19.
I had LPG in an old Magna around that time. Sure it was great back then to save a bit of cash (although around then the gap between LPG and petrol prices were closing rapidly). But when the car had problems, I couldn't trust driving the car around the city on LPG.It would run lean and conk out on me at the most inconvenient times (ie. Turning right at red lights in busy intersections). I got it fixed many times over but it was never truly reliable. Great on the open road though.
I understand they are "dual" so can flick between petrol and LPG by the proverbial flick of a knob.
The issue here is co$t.
As very well explained by Amazinggone need to do a hell of km to pay off the investment.
Pity the conversion to LPG is so expensive in Australia.
Edit: Don't know about that Magna. Others do.
Hey, that smells like regular.. she needs premium, dude! PREMIUM! DUUUUUDE!!
LPG is actually better than premium from an engine perspective.. Burns cleaner and has higher octane rating.
Pity about the gaskets though
Gaskets?? I think you mean valve seats and valves… Holy crap, back in the 90's replacing worn out pistons and rings and valve seats and valve guides on LPG cars… FML!
So, I guess, technically, yes, gaskets are a part of removing heads and valve covers.
The gasket in the Falcons LPG convertor (seperates the coolant from the LPG) pretty much vaporised every 8 years.
Got a quote of $1400 from Ford…local gas fitter sold me the gasket for $12 (took 30 mins to changeover)…but was the inconvenience of having to get the car towed when the gasket died (was dedicated lpg only).
Back when LPG was 1/3 the price of petrol it made sense, but nowdays not so sure
I still remember doing the conversions when the government was giving rebates on it, and was filling up 30-35c/L
LPG is still 1/3 of petrol.
It’s closer to half around here.
I remember when it was 12c a litre and could fill the old vh commy for less than a 10'r. Yes I'm old.
I remember getting it for 5c /litre a few times.
I remember getting LPG for 6-9c/L
Its cheaper to own a older tesla and charge it at local free infra atm
Until the batteries are dicked,maybe.
If you don't drive much the battery will be fine. Just don't go on 4+ hour road trip without a few packs of eneloops in the boot tho
What local free infra? (other than the one at Broadway shopping centre in Sydney for Teslas only, I don't think I've seen any that's actually free)
There's heaps of free ones. Best to look at chargefox for free chargers but they get busy.
Tramsheds have them, as do most shopping centres - Mac Centre(older port), Chatswood westfield (4 spots), Rhodes waterside (8 spots and normally full of teslas), Top Ryde (only two and they're slow), DFO Homebush (2 free spots), Marrickville Metro (4 free spots).
NRMA used to be free but they recently started charging for use.
Find a park with a GPO and slow charge it. Sometimes you find a park with a 3 phase outlet next to a bbq or something
Have you checked the price of older Teslas ?
Great cars if you can afford one one and travel mostly in a Metro or near metro area..
https://www.carsales.com.au/cars/used/tesla/
And before anyone slaps me with this map https://www.plugshare.com/map/australia look very closely at many of the so called charging stations in regional and rural areas.
Many of them are restricted to when you are using the business or things like this "Power point inside the toilets. You will need a 3 meter power lead." (https://www.plugshare.com/location/305676)
(Note there is a good Tesla supercharger in Ballarat for those travelling in the area and a number of slower chargers around the town and in places like coles supermarkets, soverign hill carpark etc)
This is a full list of second hand EVs currently for sale in Australia.. If you only need a short range there could be something that is affordable in this lot. Then on occasions you need a car with long range just hire one
https://www.carsales.com.au/cars/used/electric-fueltype/?sor…
Which car?
Dualis
Sinking $4,000 into a Dualis, just to save on petrol would make it an economic write off.
Trade it and buy a small hatchback.
I knew someone that got an LPG conversion done on a 1.6L Toyota Corolla
sigh
@DGrayson82: I know someone that put LPG on his Datsun Bluebird (it was me)
I was doing 500km a week just to get to and from uni. Conversion was $1100, LPG cycled from 19.9 to 32.9, petrol fluctuated up and down in the 60s.
I later bought an already converted 180B SSS, I was delivering pizzas on top of the 500km uni travels at that stage
.
Wow even the name checks out.
How much is the conversion going to cost you? How much is petrol vs LPG? how many KMs do you get per tank of petrol?
It should be pretty easy to work out approximately how many kms you need to drive on LPG vs Petrol and how long it'll take to recover the cost of the initial installation and at what point you might actually start saving.
No.
Why not buy a plug in hybrid.
Buying a car with it already fitted? Possibly. Fitting it to a current car? Unlikely.
LPG is more expensive and harder to get since especially taxis stopped using it. Hint: if it’s not worth it for a taxi, it’s not worth it.
I surprised any workshops are still doing this.
I prefer boot space…
LPG used to get a tax break compared to other fuels, this is gone.
When I had an lpg car, the rule of thumb was if petrol was under 1.5 times the lpg cost, fill up with petrol. So if lpg was 80c, petrol had to be under $1.20 to be better value.
So LPG is cheaper than petrol most of the time, but sometimes it was not (seems related to if there is a severe winter in the northern hemisphere when they need lots for heating).
Since the prices are closer now, it is only marginally cheaper most of the time. All the people who travel lots of kilometers (e.g. taxis) have switched to hybrids or electric, which should tell you all you need to know about the economics.
LPG is currently 79.9 and petrol is 221.9 at the servo I just drove past, so that makes prices further apart than in your example doesn’t it?
Yes, it is good value now. Though 79.9 is quite cheap these days.
Wow! LPG is $1.30 in Perth, vs $1.80 for ULP. So almost identical cost per Mj or km.
Why so cheap in Melbourne for LPG?
Why is it so expensive everywhere for petrol/diesel.. Did someone fart at an Arab?
@pharkurnell: Gobal demand of 100 million barrels per day, and limited supply. Think about that number. It is still cheap to extract in Saudi, but new fields are very expensive.
@bargaino: they are struggling to make a buck.
Q2 2023 Adjusted Earnings of $5.1 billion, with lower oil and gas prices and refining margins, lower volumes and lower LNG trading & optimisation results. CFFO of $15.1 billion for the quarter, with a $4.8 billion working capital inflow offsetting tax payments
@pharkurnell: Russia and the Arabs have set up payback for the sanctions (via crude oil price fix, via lower output.)
So much for sanctions. Putin might be losing the battle but he's winning the war.And he is biding his time. I can't imagine some of the under the RADAR stuff his ops in the west are getting up to. We may not know for years.
A few km south and it’s even cheaper at 72.9.
@mapax: I have an LPG vehicle and i've filled up at 69.9 in the last 2 months.
72.9-79.9 is the norm in Melbourne at the moment.
Petrol dropped in price a lot when taxis went to Priuses instead. Petrol was $1.10, lpg $0.89.
These days its more like $1.96 vs $0.99.
The last days of injected LPG cars were almost on even consumption with petrol. Pitty these ended, as the LPG biproduct is still there (SE Asia use it a lot…and for some reason we send it to them for a few cents per litre).
But electric cars are here now. Cant see LPG making a comeback.
Petrol here is north of $2.30
$2.30+ …username checks out.
The 90's called and want their fad back.
Unfortunately, dual fuel is no longer financially viable. Gas power stations are now prevalent and utilise gas - since pushing up lpg prices significantly. Your car will chew through more LPG than petrol as well so it's not really a 1:1 ratio.
What power stations use LPG??? Are you confusing it with natural gas (methane)? They are not interchangeable.
Many power stations use LPG, particularly china.
Citation? I cannot find it. China LPG imports seem to be for other industrial purposes.
If Melbourne is on the world market for LPG, why is it so much cheaper there than in Perth, where it costs 50% more?
I did a conversion in June. $4k exactly. Previously getting 18l/100k now getting 20 on LPG as expected. (Heavy city driving)
However, the car requires 95RON minimum. Back when I did the calculations average price of my fill was $1.75/L. LPG my regular fill is 0.77C/L
I get about 300km to a tank of LPG of 60L.
I also need to fill the car half full with 95 every 2 months.
The more you drive the quicker you pay it off obviously. I have driven 7k kms since the conversion at a saving of $817.03 (calculated off avg price $1.75/L for 95 premium) - this would be more now.
You need to make sure LPG is available at your local servo(s). For me there is 1 7/11 close by with LPG (a few others non 7/11 too) and 2 on our regular commute so no issues with supply.
Heavy city driving and your car only went from 18l/100km to 20l/100km when moving to LPG? I dont believe you. If you were getting 18 before, you would be at about 25l/100km+ on LPG.
LPG has an energy density of about 25MJ/kg, where petrol has a density of about 35MJ/kg. To get the same output from LPG, you would need to burn 1.4 times the amount, and this is in ideal circumstances.
May be possible with a Liquid Injection system.
Standard gas system i.e. vapour - but each cylinder has an injector
Here are my last few l/100ks. Might be fair to say 21L/100
19.87
20.77
21.53
17.36
23.05
20.32
16.70
22.73
20.58
22.06
21.91
21.17
21.78
17.31
Over this period also used 25L of petrol which is not taken into account in the above L/100
I had a vapour injected LPG system on my Mitsubishi Lancer, and the long term average fuel use increased by just 15%. The old venturi systems burned 30% more fuel.
Just get a smaller car or a hybrid.
Dont bother. You will use almost twice as much gas as you do petrol, so the saving is not as big as you think. That coupled with it getting harder and harder to find LPG at service stations.
Either trade it in for a smaller, more economical car or just keep driving it until the car needs replacing. Or, take the money you were going to spend on getting it converted and look at putting that plus your trade in towards a hybrid, PHEV or EV.
I was thinking of doing the exact same thing for a V8 Commodore but couldn't find any shops that still install a liquid injection system such as Orbital. With an OTR and tune, it should yield more power whilst at the same time only using alittle more in consumption.
Located in Sydney.
I speak from my own experience..
About 2008 I converted my VX Commodore to dual fuel (professionally done), from memory there was a handy govt rebate at the time also. About 2012 I had a massive gas backfire which literally cracked by engine in half. My only option was to replace the engine.
Moral of the story all the running cost I saved over that 4 year period was used to pay for a new engine.
So my recommednation would be not to bother!
I had LPG on a Mitsubishi Lancer from 2009 to 2016. Managed to snag a $2000 government grant to have it installed. The system would have taken over five years to reach payback without the grant.
There are various LPG systems out there and you'll find old timers giving you plenty of horror stories about the very early systems. We had the venturi systems that were inefficient and prone to backfiring. These haven't been installed in decades. Next available system was LPG vapour injection. You will use about 15% more fuel to drive the same distance. The best systems used liquid injection and achieved the same efficiency as using petrol, but the catch was they were very expensive due to patents. I haven't checked the price for a long time however, so maybe prices have come down.
No. Simples.
Okay, just called up my local LPG specialist and it should cost $3500 for the conversion and it can be done within the week. It will be a vapour injection system. (I was told that liquid injection failed to meet more modern emission standards and thus was eventually phased out). Usage should be 10-15% higher compared to petrol. With a 6.2L V8 that I can only take out once in a blue moon, it seems tempting knowing I can use it as my daily…
NO.
Many are removing gas systems nowadays.
I wouldn't, unless you were a) using a lot of it or b) using it as part of an emergency type system (a big advantage of LPG is that it can be stored indefinitely, unlike petrol)
I was using a commodore running on gas but I switched to hybrid. On the commodore I'd go through 12-15L/100Km, whereas the hybrid does 5L/100km
Gas maybe cheap, but it's not that cheap. Plus it's less convenient.
I think we really squandered the gas situation. Australia should have been pushing gas conversions harder during the 80s/90s, to the point that more vehicles were gas than not. Then we could have been using all the gas we mine ourselves instead of exporting it for pennies to other countries. I guess petrol was just too cheap at the time to care much.
If you live metro get a small temporary economical runaround, but do the maths first to justify the mileage you travel.Hyundai,or reliable Jap/Thai made model. The simpler the better and with affordable spares and service parts.
Got a Commodore Wagon (Factory dual.fuel) that ill sell for half the price of a conversion. In fairness, a modern vapour conversion is better. But the Commo never missed a beat.
For a comparison, my dual fuel (MG HS PHEV) costs me $3.65/100km for coal power, and I didn't have to pay extra for conversion since it was factory fitted.
Do I add /s??
lol another illogical post
you know when they say there's never a dumb question. Well this may be it…………
No option for public transport?
You will find LPG harder to find as time goes on. Servos are opting to decommission their LPG once its due for a major service. Ever since taxis moved to hybrids & the taxes went up on LPG demand is WAY down & its not worth the costs of maintaining the dispenser for most places.
Thanks all for the replies. Looks like it's not really worth it.
"Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning."
Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen
I had an older car on dual fuel. It would never run right on both fuels, either it was tuned to run good on LPG, or petrol.
Also out of the city, Gas is getting harder to find, service stations are taking out the infrastructure. Given that we don't have factory new vehicles to buy already converted, it will only get harder to find. Look at taxi cabs now, most are hybrid, as the Falcon/Commodores they purchased either ex-lease or new are not available anymore.
I would also add that servicing the LPG stuff has limited knowledge base in the world of mechanics,(if something does go wrong) parts will be probs be going up $,not down in all likelihood.
Consider a direct injected Ecolpi falcon because they use an efficient injection system rather than a converter.
Much better fuel delivery means less wasted fuel and better power outputs. This all increases efficiency and puts its consumption closer to a petrol variant. It’s only about 15% more consumption
They’re quicker than a petrol N/A variant. I remember a ford engineer saying they’ll beat a turbo off the line.
For those saying it’s not worth it. Here are the Melbourne prices:
LPG: 79.9
U91: 210.9 (and it’s 91, not even a good fuel most small fuel efficient cars these days need 95)
A.C.T gives a registration discount because it’s a “green fuel” good on them it makes them feel good for doing that and saves you money.
You can pick these up for a decent price. Or you can spend $48,000 on a used Tesla and watch it depreciate.
Mg4 or Dolphin are only 35k after rebate, depending on state.
What year is it!? 🧔♀️
Good question, I think it firstly depends on what state you are in noting that LPG is consistently cheaper in Vic.
I drive a Mitsu 380 on LPG and I get about 300kms from $40 of gas (at 80c/litre), which is equivalent (in $/km) to an efficient small car on petrol, but is nothing spectacular. This is with the least efficient form of gas system.
You ideally want a powerful car to run gas, as you get less power out of the vehicle. So ideally a V6.
With so much gas in Australia I think it would have made sense for the LPG conversion program to continue longer, to reduce our reliance on foreign oil and OPEC with all the havoc they can cause to dependent economies. EVs are here now - great, but still rather pricey at the moment.
I was under the assumption that dual fuel was a lost cause. Dedicated gas (no petrol, just lpg) was better. I used to drive a dedicated gas Jag with a 350 chev and it would go through 120L of LPG in about 350kms. But it was also 40c a litre back then so it was ok.
I did an injected system on a Kluger 14years ago. Drove 200k.
Got really cross when I had replace gas CPU 4 years ago.
That's when I did the numbers. Before the CPU I was ahead financially.
Replacing the CPU made it break even, but that was with petrol @$1-1.20/l, Gas .60-.80/l.
So you'd certainly be ahead with current prices because as sure as hell petrol won't drop even if the conflict in the Ukraine resolves.
The petrol giants will try to milk us while they can.
Negatives are it takes 2-3x longer to fill gas tank even slower on hot days, have to fill more often, lose storage, 12monthly gas service, not all servo's have it.
Positives, you've got both tanks which you can use on long drives, much cheaper. Gas will go up though.
Would I do it again…..probably not because of the negatives had to refill too often, painfully slow, often used up my fuel. Got a long range diesel now.
12 monthly gas service? I've been on 2 gas cars over 15 years and never had this. Mechanic has never said anything about it.
I thought it was like a once/10 year review of the system.
Lpg has lower energy density than petrol, so you use more to go the same distance. Less servos offering gas these days. Less range to a tank. Not sure how much they are charging to do a conversion these days, find that out and then calculate the payback period. Or just buy an ecolpi falcon.