I just put 51.96 liters–13.73 gallons–of gas in my car. It cost me $148.45 NZD, which is $92.65 USD. Yep; gas here is $6.75 USD per gallon.
The price of petrol (gas) in New Zealand right now is $2.917 NZD per liter, which translates to $6.75 USD per gallon. Yeah, I know. Yikes.
I’ll do the math backwards for my Kiwi friends: if you were paying what I was paying for gas back home, which is currently $3.264 USD/gallon, you’d be paying $1.38 NZD/liter. So if YOU had just put 51.96 liters of petrol in your car in the States, you would have paid $71.70 NZD…..as opposed to $148.45 NZD.
From my 23 minutes of heavy internet research, it seems that gas is so expensive here in NZ for several reasons. About 50% per liter of petrol is taxes, the biggest of which is the “fuel excise duty” that goes towards building and maintaining New Zealand’s land transport network. Then there’s the roughly 35% per liter for production and shipping costs. Then there is the war in Ukriane, with Russia and Saudia Arabia having both implemented oil production and supply cuts. Then there’s the fact that New Zealand’s tourist industry is finally on the rise again after years of pandemic lockdown and way more people are driving around.
Contrary to urban legend and campfire ghost stories, not everything in New Zealand is insanely expensive (I’ll be writing a lot about this). Gas, however, is insanely expensive. But at the end of the day, the “screaming Shelley Duvall locked in the bathroom” moments at the petrol pump are a small price to pay for living in such an extraordinary country.
PS: Yes; I have a car! And thank god it’s a car that’s good on gas. More on my car in a future post.
PPS: Math is not my forte. Even though these USD<–>NZD and gallons<–>liters conversions took me the better part of the afternoon to work out and I will literally cry if I’ve posted incorrect math, please let me know if I’m wrong!
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