It’s my baby niece’s christening in a couple of weeks, so my partner and I have got a long old car journey down to Greater London to prepare for. So we’ve been looking into a few online resources that might make the journey smoother, which I thought I’d share with you all in case you find them handy on your travels.
The first thing we thought about was when and where to fill up the car – it’s a six hour drive from the Lakes to my sister’s house, and that’s on a good day with minimal traffic, so we need a good amount of fuel to get us there. And we don’t want to spend more than we have to by filling up at pricey service stations along the way.
But thankfully, there are a lot of different ways that you can compare fuel prices online. Two of the big comparison websites, Confused.com and Go.Compare both let you find the cheapest fuel near you. So as long as the cheapest fuel station isn’t in completely the wrong direction for your journey, you can easily save some pennies by shopping around.
And for those of you who have electric vehicles, don’t feel left out! There are a couple of different websites (ZapMap and CarWow) that you can use to find your nearest car charging point. And if you can be bothered to create an account with them, you can even plan a route which shows you where you can find available charging points along the way.
And finally, we realised that some of the places we want to visit while we’re down there are within the newly-expanded ULEZ zone across Greater London. Now I know this is a bit of a contentious topic, so if you felt your blood pressure rising at the mere sight of those four letters, feel free to ignore this tip!
For those who are interested, there’s a website where you can enter your vehicle’s number plate and find out if you’ll have to pay the extra ULEZ charge to drive it in London. Generally the charge only applies to older, high-emission vehicles – nine out of ten vehicles meet the necessary standards and don’t get charged. But if you’re planning on driving in any of the London boroughs, it’s probably worth checking just in case.
When I checked both of our vehicles, even though my partner’s car doesn’t cost anything to tax because it produces very little CO2, he’d still have to pay the ULEZ charge on his car because it’s a diesel. So it looks like we’ll be taking my little petrol car instead!