New Mapquest gas price interactive map launches, also finds local alternative fuels
Mapquest launched a new interactive map service today called Mapquest Gas Prices. It feels much more like a fresh website than, say, the government's site designed to do a similar job.The idea is to find the lowest-priced fuel in your area. As a resource of great potential, Mapquest Gas Prices has built in a filter to find all sorts of alternative fuels: biodiesel, E85, hydrogen, EV charging stations, CNG and more. If you don't have an alternative-fueled car, you can also find the lowest price for standard gas in your area. You need to at least select a fuel type and a city and state (or zip code) to get results. You'll have to do the math yourself using your car's mpg to find out if it's cheaper to drive there vs. paying a few more cents per gallon around the corner (the environment would appreciate it if you visit the local store instead of driving somewhere else to fill up, but if the cheapo gas is on your way somewhere you're already going, then by all means...). You can do this using the pop-up gas price calculator, which is actually kind of fun to play with. Here's one example: an 80-mile-trip in a gas guzzling SUV (at 15 mpg) with gas that costs $3.08 will run you $16.43 total. That same drive in a 40-mpg hybrid will be just $6.16. You can input trips up to 9,999 miles, so some people will be able to use this to calculate average annual fuel costs for your car if you don't want to do it by hand.
The page just launched today, and there might be a bug or two. I can't get it to load correctly in Firefox, but it looks just fine in Safari. Also, as a disclaimer, both Mapquest and AutoblogGreen are AOL properties.
[Source: Mapquest]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Kendall Tawes 11:50PM (11/29/2007)
Good idea, it's nice to actually be able to complement something for once.
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Chris Weaver 3:03PM (11/30/2007)
Not all stations are listed.
How do additional stations get added?
What is the data source?
How old is the data?
How do you report discrepencies in the price?
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Craig 2:20PM (11/30/2007)
This isn't news at all. The site wasn't launched today but was launched months ago, in January! If Autoblog Green and Mapquest are both owned by AOL why don't they communicate better?
Or are there new features that were launched recently that I don't see? According to press release from January it looks like all of the current functionality was already there.
http://gasprices.mapquest.com/featurepage.jsp?featurepage=about.jsp
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Todd 4:20PM (12/07/2007)
A fairly new web site (that I started) is http://www.altfuelprices.com which, like the MapQuest version, lists alternative fuel stations and has pricing information. Right now the pricing information is very good for CNG and we're still expanding on pricing information for other alternative fuels.
In response to Chris, on altfuelprices.com it is very easy to update prices, add a station, say whether a station is temporarily not working or post comments about a station (such as details about location, hours, fill efficiencies, etc.) I am constantly updating the site when I hear of new stations.
Cheers,
Todd
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