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crashy,


I don't want to spoil the party and I was looking into LPG myself not so long ago. There is something that kept me from having my car converted to LPG. The costs for the convertion itself will be offset within a year, depending on  usage and how many k's you're driving. So that's something that can be calculated easy enough. However, the bad part is the value of your car should you want to trade it in for another one. This is obviously not a problem if you're driving your car until it's falling apart. There are a lot of studies about LPG efficiency and most of them ignore the fact that the loss you incure when trading in your vehicle will be much higher than the savings you managed to accumulate over the first 3 years. And it just so happens that Australians trade in their cars after 3 years on average.


That doesn't mean that LPG can't be more efficient. All you need to do is driving the same car for a few more years as depreciation will slow down the longer you drive your car while your savings on fuel will increase.


After all, there is also the environmental benefit of LPG which can't be denied. Even so you need more LPG, the emission levels are still lower than with a petrol or diesel engine.


So depending on your personal situation, LPG can save you quite some money or it may actually turn out to be one of those "pay less now to pay more later" things.


There's an interesting study from the Australian National University. They compared LPG to ULP over the lifetime of their car fleet.




The study can be found here:

http://www.anu.edu.au/facilities/anugreen/cases/lpgvehicles.html


Happy trading


Stefan


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