Fuelly Archive

Last month I left NYC and I now live in a location that requires a car. My days of taking public transport and using Zipcar are over for now. Because I drove so little and because Zipcar paid for the gas, I never had a reason to want to closely monitor my auto gasoline usage. I remember driving to Atlanta in the ’90s and my first fill-up was $0.79/gallon. Those were the days!

As I’ve been test driving a variety of cars on dealer’s lots (post coming this week), I’ve started to narrow the field for my eventual automobile purchase. I’ve spent a good deal of time browsing the community forums for each car I am interested in and I quickly noticed something in many of the user’s signatures – a fuel usage badge from Fuelly.

Fuelly is a web startup that launched back in 2008 – check out Rick Turoczy’s review from Fuelly’s launch in August 2008. Fuelly is very simple to use – you setup your car and then report in each time you add fuel to your car. You can also report the price you paid for the fuel. Fuelly calculates the MPG (miles per gallon) used during the period and charts your usage over time.

There’s a mobile app so you can report in immediately after each fill-up. That’s about it – Fuelly does one thing (automobile gas monitoring) and it does it well. Sure they could add the ability to push your updates to Twitter and Facebook but not sure anyone would actually care.

I could see Fuelly partnering with Edmunds or Kelly Blue Book to provide real-world stats about gas usage.

Here’s an example a user’s fuel usage charts: