Motorists. We know they don’t get it easy. Soaring fuel prices make the headlines pretty much every week and are causing a significant impact on wallets, journeys, jobs and livelihoods.

But now we know that UK drivers are being dealt a doubly painful blow when it comes to fuel prices. As if it didn’t make life hard enough that we’re paying extortionate amounts every time we fill up, we also have fewer petrol stations than we did in the early 1990s.

The Fuelcard Company, which endeavours to save small businesses and fleets as much money as possible on fuel via fuel cards, was disgusted at research highlighting that the number of petrol stations has more than halved in the space of twenty years, forcing people to drive out of their way to access the nearest or cheapest forecourt. How does the Government expect motorists to carry on using their cars at all without taking action in their favour? The number of sites has fallen from 21,000 in 1991 to fewer than 9,000 today. Meanwhile, the number of cars on the road has increased to 31 million. How does that work?

To call that an imbalance is an understatement. The severe reduction in forecourts can be attributed largely to the sad closure of smaller independent petrol stations as a result of the expansion of larger sites and supermarket chains.

But this is causing major problems for hard-pressed motorists. The extra money spent on travelling to petrol stations has to come from somewhere, whether it’s the family groceries budget that gets cut, or money towards other bills.

This is also an example of how ‘shopping around’ is sometimes not as practical as it sounds. If motorists have to travel further to enjoy the most competitive pump prices, they’re no longer competitive. If motorists have to travel out of their way to get fuel of any price, burning more fuel in the process, it’s only a matter of time before any price is too high a price.

Long before time – this was The Fuelcard Company’s first thought to this week’s announcement of tougher penalties for dangerous drivers who cause serious injury to others on the road.

The motoring industry unanimously supported the introduction of a new offence – “causing serious injury by dangerous driving” – which will see the current maximum sentence of two years increased to five for reckless motorists whose victims are seriously injured but not killed.

We should hope so too! The emotional and financial consequences of serious injury suffered by countless victims and their families can be long-lasting and irreparable. It’s only right that reckless motorists who race around driving irresponsibly and cause such destruction get their just desserts.

Crispin Blunt MP, the minister of prisons and sentencing policy, shared this sentiment when he said: “At the moment there are some people who are very badly injured by dangerous drivers and with the emotional trauma for the families suffering under these circumstances, there is a gap in the law that means people are not properly sentenced so we are going to address that.”

Road safety charity Brake also believes the change in law is vital. Spokeswoman Sarah Fatica commented: “It will hopefully act as a bit more of a deterrent to say to dangerous drivers, ‘your behaviour is unacceptable and we are going to punish you accordingly’.”

It’s a shame that it’s taken this long to get the law changed so that victims and their families can take comfort from the fact perpetrators are being properly punished. We support the new legislation and share Brake’s hope that it leads to improvements in driving behaviour and importantly, a reduction in serious collisions and wrecked lives as a result of dangerous driving.

The Fuelcard Company was shocked by figures from the used car website Trusted Dealers this week that suggest dishonesty among private car sellers is even more common and costly than we could ever have dreamed.

A survey of 2,000 motorists found that one in five people admit to lying when selling cars, with money listed as the main factor behind their dishonesty.

Oh, what’s that? Why didn’t you say so? If it’s about money, that’s perfectly fine…. NOT.

Really, how far are car sellers prepared to go to get rid? Pretty far, the research suggests, as the UK plummets into a pit of dodgy dealers prepared to bend the truth, with no care for the consequences to the poor hapless buyer.

Hiding existing faults was the most common lie, with 34 per cent designed to cover up mechanical issues and ten per cent hiding a poor service history. Over a third of private sellers said they had used diversion tactics to distract a buyer from a problem with the car. Neil Addley, managing director of Trusted Dealers, said: “Although the majority of lies covered small defects, a worrying minority were trying to conceal potentially serious problems.”

With nearly 6.8 million used cars sold in 2010, the findings suggest that 1.4m used cars are being sold dishonestly each year. That’s a whopping number and one that cannot be ignored.

Trusted Dealers has put together a free handy buyers’ guide to help car hunters sidestep the most common tricks and deceptions by roguish sellers. We are not saying all private car sellers who fib are ogres, but even a white lie could be very costly in the long run.

This is one of the cases where honesty really IS the best policy.

Smartphones are amazing – fact. The era of mobiles where the functions were limited to calls, text messaging, a shockingly bad quality camera and perhaps mini Solitaire, is well and truly over. With the birth of the iPhone, the Blackberry, social networking and the mobile app (of which there are now thousands), you literally can’t pull our attention away from the smartphone.

This is fine if you’re in the safety of your own home but when crossing a busy road of traffic is something else entirely.

A survey by LV= car insurance this week has revealed just how distracted we can get by our beloved smartphones, almost to the point of endangering our own lives and the lives of others. The poll saw one in ten pedestrians admitting to regularly crossing the road while distracted by a gadget, despite a third (31 per cent) admitting their ability to cross safely is extremely impaired when doing so.

Twenty million people are now estimated to own a smartphone, so the implications of this research could be very serious indeed. If these figures were to be applied across the nation, this might suggest two million people are regularly endangering their lives at crossings and junctions, all for the sake of the small shiny object in their hand.

The study, which was conducted in busy urban areas across London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Cardiff, also saw a gender divide between smartphone users and their attitude to crossing busy roads. Fifty-eight per cent of men who were observed crossing roads while using a mobile phone did so unsafely compared to 53 per cent of women.

How silly can we be? Are we that addicted that we can’t just pocket our smartphone for a few moments while we safely cross a road, and then take it out again?

Yesterday’s (26 September) Guardian reported that the smartphone obsession among young people is such that they would rather choose the latest gadget on the market rather than a flashy car. The report suggests the love affair between motoring and younger generations may be coming to an end because handheld gadgets are just becoming too darn attractive!  And as the obsession with the smartphone increases, the percentage of 17 to 20-year-olds with driving licences has fallen – from 48 per cent in the early 1990s to 35 per cent in 2010.

So not only are many pedestrians stepping out into busy traffic transfixed by their smartphone, many of them will not be drivers and therefore, may not be as conscious of what a hazard they could be causing. A dangerous combination…

FairFuelUK took its fight to the Liberal Democrats Party Conference in Birmingham yesterday (19 September) to attempt yet again to put pressure on the Government to address the vital fuel duty issue.

Quentin Willson, who is heading the campaign, joined a panel of experts at a fringe event organised by ‘The Transport Hub’, which challenged politicians on the need to consider economic growth, affordable road fuel and the environment.

According to Willson, there was ‘broad agreement’ that motorists and businesses are suffering from some of the highest levels of fuel duty in Europe. Broad agreement? Talk about an understatement. Our survey found that 35 per cent of businesses have been forced to turn down work because it is impossible to make any profit due to escalating fuel costs; thousands of people across the country have drastically changed their driving habits, slowing down to save on fuel, and yet and yet there was only ‘broad agreement’ that the fuel issue needs to be addressed?

Even taxi drivers have woken up to the over-priced smell of fuel and transformed their driving style to save money. Shell challenged 18 cab drivers to cut their fuel costs by adopting fuel-efficient driving techniques. The experiment was a huge success and the cab drivers exceeded their initial target of 10 percent fuel consumption savings over a month, doubling it to 20 percent. If cabbies are prepared to reform their notoriously erratic driving behaviour to save a few bob on fuel costs we must be in trouble!

FairFuelUK now has the support of 150 MPs and needs just 10,000 more signatures to force a Parliamentary debate on the fuel duty issue, however our sceptical side wonders whether this will make a blind bit of difference. Although generating this level of support – only a mere 90 thousand signatures – should result in Government action to ease the plight of struggling motorists, our protests seem to have been falling on deaf ears.

If you haven’t already, please sign the petition, as the more noise we all make the more difficult it will become for the Government to ignore us. http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/347

The trusted cabbie. Oh, how we appreciate the sight of that gleaming line of cars in the rank after a night out, or emerging from airport arrivals, especially if it’s raining.  By their very nature, these are the fleet drivers who literally go the extra mile so we don’t have to. They put in limitless travel time every week and month, at unimaginable cost, and, like many fleets, are the ones who suffer the most when fuel prices rocket.

So, they made the perfect participants for a Shell experiment to determine how much money fuel efficient driving really CAN save you a year. And the results could have far-reaching benefits for every motorist in the country.

You hear a lot about similar studies suggesting that changing your driving habits can save you money. There’s a reason for that. It’s because they DO. If only more of us put in that extra effort; think how much money collectively we could save.

The Shell trial, which challenged 18 drivers to reduce their fuel consumption by ten percent over the course of a month, found that small changes to driving habits could dramatically reduce fuel costs. To the tune of just under £550, on average, per year!

After studying the driving style of the cabbies, to identify which was the most fuel efficient, Shell produced a set of driving tips which would give motorists maximum fuel efficiency, including turning down the air conditioning, avoiding over-revving and reducing the load being carried in the boot.

If all of the rules were followed, Shell claims, the average motorist would save £544 a year – the equivalent cost of two years’ road tax.

Fourteen of the cab drivers, picked from ten cities across Britain, were equipped with on-board computers which tracked driving behaviour, while a further four drivers tracked their performance themselves to see whether they would make more of an effort in implementing the tips.

At the end of the trial, the cab drivers exceeded their initial target of a ten per cent fuel consumption saving over a month, doubling it to 20 per cent.

Melanie Lane, General Manager, Shell UK Retail, said: “We know fuel prices are high right now so it’s important that we help people save fuel and money.

“We’re pleased to see that our drivers have taken the challenge so seriously and on average have doubled our expected fuel reduction target. We hope this campaign can show that if cabbies can do it, all drivers can become smarter, more fuel-efficient and see the impact on their pocket.”

Please spread the word about this study. This will not only help individual motorists having big chunks taken out of their monthly household budget by fuel, but businesses with fleets of ten, twenty or a hundred drivers. If you fancy finding out more about how fuel-efficient driving can help, read more on Business Fuel Cards.

There’s nothing better for a motorist in the current economic climate than knowing you have a mechanic you can trust who won’t fleece you for routine repairs.

Sadly, new research released this week suggests that this is only a pleasure enjoyed by the lucky few.

Warranty Direct’s annual Labour Rates Survey highlighted a significant rise in the average amount motorists pay for garage labour in the space of a year, from £74.81 per hour in 2010 to £80.44 per hour now.

But what really shocked us was the gaping difference between the lowest and highest fees charged by garages, with drivers in Northumberland paying £66.66 compared to £98.21 in Middlesex. One supplier in Essex has even been reported to charge customers an appalling £202.21 per hour!

Duncan McClure Fisher of Warranty Direct said: “Drivers might have hoped there’d be some reprieve from the staggering costs of motoring, but no, they’re getting clobbered yet again.  To think that some workshops are charging in excess of £200 an hour is astounding – that’s equivalent to some people’s weekly wage. Motoring costs are approaching an unsustainable level.”

No kidding. As if it wasn’t bad enough that drivers are having to manage some of the highest fuel costs in a generation, garages are not giving them an easy ride either.

However, having said that, there was support for garages from Sue Robinson, director of RMI, who argued that garage owners have kept their prices down as much as possible over the last two to three years due to the economic climate. But now, as soaring fuel and utility bills take hold, they are having to recoup their costs somehow.

We agree and sympathise with establishments facing crippling costs. That’s fine if the same hourly rate was charged everywhere. But with such vastly differing fees, there is no assurance that drivers will be treated fairly wherever they take their car. Well, except for those who can call upon the value-for-money services of a trusted supplier.

We can’t help but wonder what that Essex garage was offering alongside its normal repair service? Gold dust?

A supermarket offering vouchers for 5ppl off petrol to its biggest shoppers is usually enough to whip the British public up into a frenzy of impulse buys and bulk purchases, but imagine if your petrol was so cheap you didn’t need to worry about constantly shaving pennies off the price…

In Britain, fuel price grumbles have become a part of day-to-day life with forecourt prices reaching almost 140 pence per litre of fuel and motorists adopting more efficient driving styles to compensate. However, in Venezuela, drivers can top up their run-arounds for as little as 2p per litre. This means they can fill an average family saloon for about the same price as the bland Ginsters pasty we often buy on our visits to the forecourt.

It sounds like bliss to the average commuter, but it’s just the norm for inhabitants of the South American country. We reckon you’ve read those first two paragraphs and are already frantically packing suitcases and putting your house up for a quick sale, right?

As if you needed more of an incentive to brush up on your Spanish, here are a few slightly more creative ways to enjoy the ludicrously cheap petrol, just because you can:

-Buy a sit-on petrol powered lawnmower, because nothing says alpha male quite like mowing the lawn on something needs an MOT

-Fashion your own liquid fuel flamethrower, which could be an elegant solution for all jobs from lighting a cigarette to clearing the wasps’ nest in the garden

-Keep your engine running all the time; this will allow you to leave the heater on in winter, so no more cold leather seats on a morning!

Disclaimer: references are for comic value only. By no means do we condone the assembly or use of DIY incendiary devices.

But seriously, before we start feeling too hard done by, spare a thought for the poor Norwegians, with the average fuel price in Oslo at 164p per litre!

Britain’s first motorway service station was formally opened on 2 November 1959 in an austere ceremony. “Ye Olde Over-Priced Sandwich Shoppe” read the banner on the bland shack as millions of motorists across Britain sighed heavily at the prospect of having to routinely stop to ‘stretch their legs’ in these featureless complexes. The owners even sent out an apologetic press release shortly after, asking for forgiveness for plaguing motorways with these atrocities.

Unfortunately, despite the combined efforts of central government, the police force and the army, the service stations spread to all corners of the UK motorway network, and continue to haunt us wherever we travel.

A recent survey released by Confused.com has recommended that we fall back in love with service stations. Personally, I’m struggling to find the reason we ever ‘fell out of love’ with them, I mean what’s not to love? If someone asked me if I wanted to spend half an hour in a dingy hall that smelt faintly of urine then pay £1.40 for a Kit-kat I’d say sign me up…

Regrettably, sometimes there’s no way of avoiding service stations, it’s important to take regular breaks on long journeys. However, when said breaks involve forcing down a service station cheese sandwich, no doubt stuffed with so many preserving agents the EU have considered placing a biohazard warning on the packaging, many drivers would no doubt rather push on, stomach rumbling. What’s worse while driving: feeling drowsy at the wheel or spontaneously sprouting an extra arm from excessive E number consumption?

Don’t worry though, Confused.com have teamed up with comedian Matthew Horne (a household name?) to bring laughter to Britain’s service stations. In my opinion, the only laughter you’ll ever hear in these ‘airports of the motorway’ is the maniacal variety as somebody pays a visit with a bulldozer and some explosives.