Uh oh! The average tank of fuel now costs over £100

According to the RAC’s Fuel Watch - which tracks the wholesale and retail prices of fuel in the UK - the cost of unleaded has rocketed up to a record high of 182.31 pence per litre. Ouch.

That means filling up a car with a 55-litre tank will now set you back more than £100 for the first time ever. Which makes for very depressing reading indeed.

Meanwhile the average price of diesel has climbed to 188.05 pence per litre, and experts have warned that we need to brace ourselves for the shock of £2 per litre in the very near future. Double ouch.

“It’s a truly dark day today for drivers,” said RAC spokesperson Simon Williams. “While fuel prices have been setting new records on a daily basis, households up and down the country may never have expected to see the cost of filling an average-sized family car reach three figures.”

The reasons for soaring prices at our forecourts are even more grim, of course. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the international sanctions that followed is one, a weak pound in relation to the dollar (the currency in which oil is bought) is another.

What many people will now be asking is ‘What can I do about it?’ There are plenty of ways to save money on fuel, chief among which in the last few years has been switching to an electric car. If you can afford such a thing, that is.

EVs are still cheap to run, but electricity prices haven’t been immune from rises either. In the UK the average unit price is now capped at 28.3 pence per kilowatt-hour until October; a third more than it was in the six months leading up to March. Meanwhile standing charges (the daily rate you pay just to have access to electricity, even if you use none) rose from 24.9 pence per day to 45.3 pence per day.

Put simply, fully charging a Standard Range Ford Mustang Mach-E (75kWh) cost you about £15.75 at the turn of the year, but that’s gone up to about £21.23 now. Being generous, let’s say you get all 273 miles of promised range from the Mach E: that’s still less than eight pence per mile.

Even a bog-standard, highly frugal Toyota Aygo - claiming 68.9mpg - can’t beat that on today’s scary fuel prices, coming in at 12 pence per mile according to TG’s trusty calculator.

So imagine what your hot hatch/behemoth of an SUV is costing you. Actually, don’t.