Love Road Trips? Here's How You Can Calculate The Cost Of Fuel

Road trips are a good way to de-stress and usually helps you unwind from your daily routines. While the cost of fuel can quickly add up on road trips, they are still far less expensive than flights.

Let's learn how to best plan and budget for road trips in your vehicle to reduce worry.

What Should You Budget For A Road Trip?

The answer is based on how far you plan to travel. You might not need to budget as much money if you are only crossing one state, but if you are crossing five states, you may need to do more planning and set aside a larger sum of money.

Setting A Fuel Budget

Fuel expenses will account for one of the biggest portions of your travel budget. You can simplify your financial preparation by using a straightforward process to estimate how much fuel will cost for your trip.

To start with, check the petrol price in India or the diesel price in India to calculate the total cost estimate for fuel. The best way to do that would be to use the NDTV tools pages and determine the cost based on the places to visit planned.

Fuel prices vary from state to state as the VAT, or value added tax, is determined by respective states and as such make sure to take advantage of fueling in at a lower-priced place to bring the cost of your travel down.

The NDTV tools page helps you with the latest petrol price in India and the diesel price in India, including a breakdown of petrol price and diesel price in different states, and is updated almost real-time - as and when oil companies change their pricing, which in India is on a daily basis.

India adopted the daily fuel price change process in June 2017 under a new format of calculating the cost of petrol and diesel called the 'Dynamic Fuel Price Methodology', from a fortnightly change before that.

Indeed, prior to June 2017, state-run oil marketing corporations adjusted fuel prices twice a month, on the first and sixteenth, based on the average global price of crude oil and the rupee/dollar exchange rate.

But since then, the fuel price adjustments have been made on a daily basis using the Dynamic Fuel Price Methodology, which taken into account global prices, the rupee to dollar exchange rate, demand from trade activity in international energy markets.

For more details on the pricing and methodology, see NDTV's Petrol And Diesel Prices In India data page.

Mileage Check:

The next step, which is getting into the vehicle you'll be driving and determining its typical usage and mileage. This will give you a good notion of how much fuel your car uses relative to the distance it has travelled.

Finally, grab a calculator and quickly crunch some numbers to finish. Multiply the round-trip distance by the fuel efficiency of your vehicle and add the national average fuel price (using the NDTV's Petrol And Diesel Prices In India) to arrive at your budget.

Happy travels!