Chaotic gasoline prices: refueling cheaply could soon be easier

In just a few hours, the price of gasoline for Super E10 falls by 19 cents per liter. Has a conflict been pacified in the Middle East? No. Have the oil sheikhs of OPEC perhaps fallen out? Neither. It’s a normal day in Germany. At a normal gas station.

We picked a Total gas station in Duisburg. She changed the price 22 times on that day, April 30th. That is average in Germany.

A Shell gas station in Munich changed the price 32 times that day. A Bavaria Petrol branch and an Esso station, also in Munich, even 36 times. The Shell branch, for example, changed the Super E10 price every 15 minutes in the hour and a half after eight o’clock. The price fluctuated on that day by a total of 13 cents per liter, at Bavaria-Petrol by 14, and at Esso by 16 cents per liter.

Day after day, gas stations in Germany perform a price dance that looks like competition, but is more of a confusing game for consumers. Prices at gas stations have been transparent for twelve years. All gas stations must report their data to the cartel office, which releases the data to fuel app providers. At the beginning, the gas stations changed the price on average four to five times a day. In principle it was enough to look at the boards on the way home and you would get the picture.

Clarity could soon return to Germany’s gas stations. The Federal Council will decide on Friday . The content: The federal government is being asked to make prices more understandable and more stable again through new rules.

The applicants from Baden-Württemberg, which is governed by green and black governments, are toying with the rule from Austria without committing to it. The price can be reduced as often as you like, but can only be increased once a day. This automatically limits the number of changes in total.

The Federal Council had already passed a similar proposal in 2012, but six months later the Bundestag decided not to regulate prices as strictly as in Austria when it set up the market transparency office. As a result, the situation at gas stations has now become just as confusing as it was back then.

The star had already asked the oil companies in a survey in the spring to explain why they change the price at the pumps so often. Most responded extremely narrow-lipped. Some, like Hem and Aral, said that antitrust law prevented them from answering (which is generally not true). Shell didn’t respond at all. Jet at least answered that staralbeit vague: the high number of price changes is an “expression of intense competition.”

The Federal Association of Independent Gas Stations (BFT) reacted much more openly at the time. “In principle, we could live with fewer price changes and some of our member companies have tried to isolate themselves from the daily price fluctuations by making no or only a few price changes,” said a BFT spokeswoman star. “It has been shown that the customer only rewards this behavior if the price displayed is below the price of the competitors.” The cartel office also believes that independent gas stations do not change their prices as often as the big oil company brands.

The examples described above are just a sample. In metropolitan areas, it is no longer unusual for gas stations to change prices more than 35 times a day. The cartel office has already observed that individual gas stations turned the gas meter 57 times this year. “This makes orientation more difficult for consumers,” complained Cartel Office President Andreas Mundt. Drivers often complain to the cartel office because they discover low prices on a fuel app, but they no longer find them when they arrive at the gas station a few minutes later.

In a small survey, the Cartel Office conducted an investigation into the times at which drivers actually fill up: According to this, in 2023 only 43 percent managed to get a price in the lower quarter of the price scale. In 2015, just under 60 percent achieved this.

Price transparency should actually help consumers. But now it turns out that the gas stations themselves can use the transparency to reduce their prices just as much as necessary. The price trends turned out to be quite synchronous. And it is noticeable that there is a silent agreement to fleece consumers who have to fill up their tank in the morning. At least that’s what the average price trend, as shown in the following graphic, suggests. And in our samples we also saw it in a similar way at the gas stations examined.

Now it’s only logical that people don’t have the time in the morning to go to a gas station that isn’t on the direct route to work. While a few years ago you could still be pretty sure that you would at least be able to fill up cheaply in the evening after work, most gas stations now allow themselves a few higher-priced periods.

Important: Drivers should not take out their frustration about the price confusion on the gas station attendant. “The gas station tenant just looks out the window and sees that his prices are being changed – and doesn’t know why or when,” explains Herbert Rabl, spokesman for the gas station interest group tiv, which represents the tenants’ interests. They would only receive a commission of “one to three cents per liter” – regardless of the price at the pump.

The big brands often use software-supported pricing systems that automatically react to the environment of a gas station and adjust the prices.

It’s not enough to look for a cheap gas station. You also have to choose the right time to refuel. It’s worth using a fuel app from ADAC, for example. The graphic that the clever-tanken.de website creates for each gas station is very interesting: In the evening, you can see at what time the gas station charged what price that day.

If you choose both the gas station and the time optimally, you will pay around 30 cents less for Super E10 in large cities such as Berlin, Frankfurt and Stuttgart than if you pump gas at the most expensive gas station at 7 a.m. in the morning. For diesel it is around 28 cents less. This was the result of an evaluation by the Cartel Office at the beginning of the year.

In other words: on any given day, prices vary more in absolute terms than the world’s oil markets were able to move the price of oil over the past twelve months.