Why not add location to fuel ups?

[T5i]

I drive around the state a lot and like to keep track of which station and brand of fuel I fill up with and where. It helps me compare brands and compare prices at certain gas stations. I think It would be a fantastic add on. That way I could start to avg where the less expensive gas is and which city to fuel up in. You already keep track of prices... why not allow me to hit a button and add the location to my notes. Then on the site I can later click it and link it a Google map.

[pb]

This is an interesting idea—something we've been thinking about. Tracking at the city level like you're talking about would be fairly straightforward. Tracking individual gas stations within in a city would another level of complexity. To do this right I think we'd need to track gas stations, and so far we haven't been able to find a solid database of stations.

The other piece adding complexity is that you'd need a location-aware smartphone to make this easy. We already optionally track the longitude/latitude for you with Fuelly Mobile, but getting the correct gas station (or even a list of nearby stations) is another level of complexity. It's possible we could tap into Foursquare's location API—that's something we've thought about.

But the reality is that most fuel-ups are added here at the website long after the fuel-up has taken place. In that case when you're at a keyboard, it's not so bad to type in the location. So we haven't felt like Fuelly is at the point where this more complicated location-tracking is worthwhile. It might get there someday.

In the meantime, if you fill up via Fuelly Mobile you'll have the longitude/latitude of your fuel-up in a data export. If you're handy with scripting you could turn those points into a map with fuel price averages. We're not quite ready to take that step here, but it's definitely something to think about.

[MMUK]

Hopefully this would be an optional feature rather than mandatory.

a) I don't care where I fuelled up :-), and b) I wouldn't want to publish it even if I did!

[pb]

Yeah, I can't think of any reason why any location-specific features would be mandatory. The little we do now at Fuelly Mobile is completely optional.

[gt1]

Another possibility would be to use data from gasbuddy.com (don't know if they allow it) and enter the fuel price automatically.

Not really necessary, but cool.

[Rubberdude88]

O currently use the notes section to put fill-up location or anything else that I want to record. It's only stored under the fill-up so you can't graph it or anything like that but it's there if I want to know. Just an idea for ya. Cheers.

[thehawk]

99% of the time I enter my fill up on the spot and the iPhone seems to ask if it can use my location (and I always hit yes). I'm not sure if that actually gets recorded anywhere, but it would be nice if it did.

One for the nerd inside that likes to see these stats. Like where I fill up most often, a heatmap of fillups... stats stats and more stats.

What could be useful is having a record of where you filled up on the off chance you have issues with fuel. Or again from the stats perspective which stations tend to give you better economy (some stations have poor fuel which may just show through in the stats).

[Jay2TheRescue]

I always put the station brand and location in my fillup notes so I can track if any particular station's fuel yields higher economy than others.

[RobertV]

Definitely something we've been thinking about implementing.
Perhaps... in the near future.

[Draigflag]

I have a question, for those using thier phones at petrol stations, its considered dangerous to use phones in the UK at petrol stations, its not permitted. Just wondered if the case is the same in the US?