what was the lowest you remember gas????

[Kenny C]

I love the 55' Nomads.

[savageje]

Lowest price I can remember was 88 cents in the late '80s.  (I was born in 1976.)  I can remember my great grandfather complaining about having to pay $1.85 a gallon in the early 1980s and have often thought what he'd say if he were still alive today.  Of course, a dollar went a lot farther 30 years ago than it does today.

[AET]

I like the 57's myself.  I'm more of a sucker for something with Woodie Paneling!

I love the 55' Nomads.

[DavePEI]

I don't remember the exact cost per gallon, but I used to drive my 1970 Fiat Sport Spider 850 from Toronto to Brockville, Ont. and back again on $5 worth of gas - almost 500 highway miles. Of course, it wasn't exactly a gas guzzler, either.

Dave

[twocvbloke]

The lowest I recall Petrol being was somewhere in the 30p range in the late 80's/very early 90's, per Imperial Gallon of course, then they switched over to Litres, which just confused matters and they made even more per Gallon than the Litres were showing...

And back then we had Leaded 4-Star, Unleaded and sulphurous Diesel, Now you can only buy Unleaded (and it's "super higher octane" and percentage-of BioEthanol varieties which makes no damned difference in an un-tuned car!!!) and ULS (Ultra-Low-Sulphur) Diesel, there are a very select few places who still acquire and sell Leaded 4-star, but, you'd have to use a lot of fuel to fill'er up in just finding the places...

And the prices today, just about £1.40/Litre for Diesel, and £1.38/Litre for Unleaded, that's about $8.35/Gal for Petrol, and $8.48/Gal for Diesel, after converting Litres to US Gallons and £s to $s and all that, so, you guys have it cheap over there....

There's also LPG too, which I think is about 50-60p/Litre, but you don't get as much bang for your buck with LPG on most engines that are converted with aftermarket kits but not properly re-tuned, usually something like a 30% drop in power, so you use more fuel to get going, so not really much of a saving, plus you have to drive around with a loaded bomb in the back in the form of a pressurise gas cylinder, not quite one you'd use for a barbecue, but a slightly more toughened up one, not really a very comfortable drive...

But, if you buy an old Diesel car like say a Mercedes W123 300D or a Vauxhall Diesel with an Isuzu lump under the bonnet, you can just pour good ol' fashioned Vegetable oil (pretty apt too, seeing as Rudolf Diesel never actually made his original engines to run on what we now refer to as diesel, he used Peanut oil!!), which is still cheaper per litre than road diesel, despite it's increased use as a fuel. You can also run most diesel engines on Biodiesel, which is a refined form of veg, oil to make it thinner and easier for fuel pumps to pump from tank to engine, but a lot of modern GM Diesel engines will not run on it because of some silly reason that only GM knows...

Plenty fuel for thought there...

[TelePlay]

Depends on region, or state. In Wisconsin it was 25 to 30 cents a gallon in the mid-1960's. They had to truck the stuff in from refineries hundreds of miles away. Dollar a carton for cigarettes, quarter in the machine at the end of the bar. Large glass of beer was 10 cents, large pitcher was a buck. Juke box was nickle a play - "Put another nickel in, In the nickelodeon, All I want is having you, And music, music, music." And life was good! 

[dpaynter1066]

25 cents a gallon at the Esso station when I got my first car and started caring. It was a white Impalla convertable with red leather seats.  I lost half of my social life when the brakes failed on Thrill hill one night.  The gas pumps were rounded on top and there was a little dome sight glass on the side with a colored cork in it that would swirl around as they pumped gas for you.

I suppose people didn't trust that gas was actually going into the car if all you could see was the metal number wheels turning.  

Old man Varnadore ran the Esso station and chewed and spit tobacco  and told me : "Them bastids wont be happy till they get the price up to a dollar a gallon, That's what they gonna do!" He grumbled as he watched the attendants check the oil and water, wash the windows and put air in the tires.


Sure enough, when the Gas embargo eventually ran prices up to a dollar a gallon, the gears didn't go up that high to change the price, so they set it at 25 cents and put a sign on it that said "price times four".  That really challenged the gas pump attendant who filled your tank for you because he wasn't that good at math in the first place.  If you were one of the rare birds like my dad who had a credit card, you had to go into the office where they put the card into an embossing machine to imprint the raised card number onto a receipt.  Eventually they got a new set of gears and upgraded the pump to display dollars.

The price dropped back down below fifty cents for awhile and everyone bitched about the high price.  Around that time they hoisted up a new sign and re labled everything to say "Exxon".

I asked Mr. Varnadore about that, and he rubbed grease off his hands on a red rag and said " Yep, they was wanting to sell gas overseas and found out that  Esso means something  sexual and dirty like in Japan so they named it Exxon coz that don't mean nothin in any language"

[AE_Collector]

Something like 46 to 48 cents an Imperial gallon in Canada when I started to drive in 1973.

In more recent years (late 90's? or was that early 21 century... when ever it was that oil dropped to about $10 a barrel for a bit) it dropped as low as 34 cents a litre in Vancouver area and as low as 22 cents a litre just across the border in Washington State. Where my cabin is at Point Roberts WA they sell gas by the litre (well probably "by the LITER" there ) since there are many more Canadian customers than US customers.

Terry

[david@london]

i remember in the sixties, petrol here in england was about 5 bob (shillings) a gallon. that's 25p in modern money, about 40 US cents at today's exchange rate.

you got green shield stamps and free gifts like an esso man key ring........or a tiger's tail to hang on your bike.

[DavePEI]

Esso (Imperial Oil) here used to give away Tiger tails to go along with their ditty, "You've Got a Tiger in your Tank!" A lot of them wound up on bikes here, too. They were designed to hang out of your fill cap. I also remember service companies giving out first aid kits and mini tool kits to their customers.

The last time I remember a gas station giving anything out was about ten years ago when one of the companies gave out Stanley wrenches - one with each fill-up.

Dave

[Russ Kirk]

The earliest I remember was 1971.  I snuck out of the house with my Mom's 1967 Mustang.  I was only 15 and I haven't even got my learner's permit yet.   No license - but when you are a teenager you never think you'll get caught.

I picked up some friends and off we went. Cannot remember what we did but I know I drove a lot and used way too much gas.  So I pulled in the cheapest place I knew.  I told my buddy we need to get some gas in the tank so my parents would not know I  took the Mustang.   Oh no!  We were both broke and not a cent on us!  So I frantically searched the car for spare change, found almost a dollars' worth under the seats and floor mats  - almost 3 gallons at 36 cents a gallon.  

Got home before my parents - I got away with it!  What can I say?  I was dumb teenager!

So, as a parent I remember those days.  I chalked my tires, locked away the keys and wrote down mileage, just in case. Guess I raised my daughter right,  now in her 20's she says she never took the car out.  

[AE_Collector]

The last time I remember a gas station giving anything out was about ten years ago

No, they still gove away air....as long as you pay for it and even then that is only if the compressor and coin acceptor are even working. Recently I discovered a nail in my tire and the tire was REALLY low. I figured if I headed to the gas station for air I could just make it otherwise I had to get out the spare and the jack etc. Did a quick guestimate of whether I was better heading North to the Esso station or south to petro canada. Chose Esso and lost. Just made it there only to discover the air pump not working at all. Jumped in the car and headed to Petro Can as fast as I could and got it filled up. Cost me a dollar there where as the non working Esso was only 50 cents.

Terry

[twocvbloke]

And that's why buying a 12v mini-compressor to throw in the boot of your car is a great idea, saves wrecking your legs with a foot pump and saves you paying silly prices for air, especially when the compressors at fuel stations don't work...

[old_stuff_hound]

I also recall that I really liked the smell of pumping gas, it doesn't smell the same anymore.

A half-dozen years ago or so I was traveling somewhere and as I was pumping gas I noticed the odor of it and thought, "Hey! This is what gas used to smell like! It smells different now!" Up to that point it hadn't occurred to me that it had changed. I don't know when it changed but you're right -- it has. And I've not smelled the old aroma since.

Speaking of odors, when I was a kid my Grandad and I would wrench on various mechanical things and for cleaning parts he had an old aluminum milk can full of "solvent." That's as specific as he got with it. "Go get me some solvent." I don't know what it was -- Varsol, probably. But that's another smell I haven't smelled in a long time.

Cheapest gas I remember was about 70¢, probably early-mid 1980s....

[McHeath]

Gasoline here in California looks like water these days, it's clear, and has very little smell.  Man back in the 70's I'd be siphoning it out of mom's car to power my go cart and if you got a mouth full you'd be hurting!  It was awful strong, and fouled your mouth and sinuses forever.  Even getting it on your hands was hard to get off, but not anymore.  So I guess that's one advantage eh?

I've got an old Ford F250 that holds nearly 50 gallons, it will most likely never have that much gas in it's tanks every again!