Save Car Money

The most obvious way to save money on running a car is to cut down on your fuel consumption, and we have a whole host of tips on how to save fuel when driving a car. However saving fuel is only one way to cut down on the costs of owning a car, and some people may not want to drive as sensibly as others- so what other ways can you save money whilst still enjoying owning and driving a car?

Search for Cheaper Petrol prices

Obviously this site is designed to help you with that, and we have a petrol pricing map so that you can research the best prices in your area. But do watch out, you will only save money overall if you don't drive too far out of your way to fill up with petrol. Just do your research, use our map to find the cheapest petrol prices in the areas that you drive through, and fill up with fuel accordingly

Supermarket Petrol Savings

Often the supermarkets (who generally have cheaper petrol anyway) will offer special deals such as 5p, or even 10p off the price of a litre of fuel. Usually you have to spend over a certain amount in the store to gain the money off voucher, but this is normally easily achievable from the regular weekly supermarket shop. Tescos often offer 5p off if you spend over £50, and have recently (July 2011) started to offer 5p savings vouchers if you buy random goods such as toilet paper and tins of tuna. Sainsburies recently beat the Tesco 5p saving with a whopping 10p off every litre of fuel when you spend over £60 in store. The other big stores, Morrisons and Asda, tend not to offer money off vouchers, but still give great savings by offering the cheapest petrol around.

Collecting reward points on petrol

A number of petrol brands offer reward points for buying petrol, and these reward points can often add up to big savings. Sainsburies and BP both offer Nectar points for every pound spent on petrol, and these points can be converted into shopping vouchers or even cash. If you have a smartphone then it is definately worth downloading the Nectar mobile app as this allows you to pick up even more points, in particular BP often run double or even tripple reward points when you buy fuel from them.

Tesco offer tesco reward points when you buy fuel, and these can really add up to big savings, either use them to buy essentials such as car breakdown cover, or luxuries such as cinema tickets and meals out. Alternatively you can convert the Tesco vouchers into cash to spend in store. If you also pick up a Tesco credit card then you can collect even more reward points when buying fuel

On the subject of credit cards a particulary good one for the motorist is the AA credit card which offers double reward points on any fuel purchases from any petrol station in the UK.

Save on Car running costs

You can cut the cost of running a car without cutting the pleasure you get from driving. You could think about switching from an unleaded car to a diesel car, which will give you more miles to the gallon without necassarily cutting back on performance. The savings can be quite considerable, for example switching from a 1.6 ford focus petrol to a 1.6 ford focus diesel will save you £100 a year on road fund tax and also give you around a £400 a year saving on fuel costs, assuming you cover 12,000 miles a year.

There are also fuel saving tyres available from major brands such as Dunlop and Continental which claim to save you 10s of litres of fuel a year. There may be some performance issues with these tyres, but the technology is certainly improving.

Save Weight in the car

Cutting down on the weight of your car will save you money on fuel whilst also improving the performance of your car. Think about replacing the spare tyre with a space saver tyre, or get rid of it completely and replace it with a tyre welding kit. Other weight saving ideas include just simply taking out a load of that junk that you carry around in the car. If you are taking weight saving seriously then you may consider only ever filling up your car to half full. You'll have to go to the petrol station twice as often, but you'll save around 30Kg of weight by doing so. And finally, dont forget that fuel is sold by volume rather than by weight, so you can gain a little extra by buying petrol when its cold (i.e. late at night or first thing in the morning), the saving is extremely minimal but it all helps.

Save by shopping around

We've all seen the adverts for cheaper car insurance, but how many people haven't taken advantage of the savings that can be made by shopping around? There are plenty of price comparison websites available that claim to save the average motorist a fortune, but don't forget that some of the bigger names, including Direct Line, don't feature on these sites. So to make sure you get the biggest savings on car insurance try one of the price comparision websites and then try a couple of the big insurance companies yourself.