There's a particular kind of quiet that happens in a car when the fuel light comes on somewhere between Miles and Roma with nothing but paddocks either side. Tony's had that exact moment more than once, back before either of us bothered doing the maths properly beforehand, and it's not a feeling you forget in a hurry. These days we don't leave the driveway on a longer trip without working out fuel numbers first, because guessing "she'll be right, we'll fill up somewhere" is how you end up doing the last twenty kilometres in second gear with the air con off, praying.
The trouble with fuel estimates most people do in their head is they use the number on the sticker or the one they remember from a good trip years ago, not what the car's actually using loaded up with camping gear, four people, and a roof pod catching wind the whole way. A ute or wagon that sips fuel around town at 9 litres per hundred kilometres can easily be using 12 or 13 once it's loaded and towing, or even just pushing into a headwind on the Warrego Highway for four hours straight. That difference between "sticker" and "reality" is exactly where people get caught out on the long stretches with nothing in between.
Our actual process now starts before we've even packed the car. We work out the real trip distance using whatever mapping app gives the most accurate reading for the actual route, not the straight-line distance, because outback roads rarely go in a straight line and detours around flooded causeways or roadworks add up. Then we use the trip fuel cost calculator at https://freeonlinetools.au/tools/trip-fuel-cost-calculator.php with a fuel consumption figure we know is realistic for loaded, towing conditions, not the number from the fuel economy label, which is measured in conditions nobody actually drives in. Put in the distance, the consumption rate, and current fuel prices, and it gives you total litres needed and total cost, which does two jobs at once: tells you the budget for fuel money, and tells you roughly how many fill-ups you're looking at across the trip.
The fill-up count matters more than the total cost most of the time, because that's what tells you whether you need to plan around specific towns. If the numbers say you need three tanks to get from Brisbane to somewhere out past Longreach, you start looking at the map for where those three fill-ups actually need to happen, and whether any of those towns have servos that are open when you'll be rolling through, plenty of small-town servos in the west close well before dark, and some aren't open Sundays at all. Knowing you need fuel roughly every 500 kilometres means you plan the day around servo towns rather than hoping one turns up when the needle's getting low.
We build in a buffer too, and this is the bit that's saved us more than once. Whatever the calculator says for litres needed, we treat that as the minimum, not the plan, because headwinds, air conditioning flat out in January heat, overtaking road trains, and towing all push consumption up from whatever baseline number you used. Tony's rule of thumb after enough trips is to add fifteen to twenty percent onto the calculated fuel need for anything remote, and to never let the tank get below a quarter full once you're past the last town with more than one servo. It sounds overly cautious sitting at home planning the trip, and feels completely reasonable once you're actually out there with red dirt either side of the road and the next town showing 140 kilometres on the sign.
Fuel prices are the other variable worth checking rather than assuming, because they swing more between regional towns than a lot of people expect, sometimes twenty or thirty cents a litre difference between towns only a couple of hours apart, particularly the more remote you get. Running the calculator again with updated prices once you've got a rough idea of the route helps set actual expectations for what the trip will cost, rather than being surprised at how much cash disappeared into the tank by the time you're back home going through receipts.
The other habit worth mentioning, separate from the calculator but connected to it, is actually tracking real consumption against what you calculated once you're on the road. Reset the trip meter at each fill, note the litres it actually took and the kilometres actually covered, and you'll quickly build a real picture of what your specific vehicle uses loaded versus unloaded, city versus highway, towing versus not. After a few trips you stop needing to guess at all because you've got your own numbers from your own car doing exactly this kind of trip, which beats any number on a manufacturer's sticker every time.
We've also started using the calculator to settle an argument that comes up every time a trip's being planned, coastal route versus inland route. The coastal way is usually longer in kilometres but often better roads and more consistent speed, while cutting inland can look shorter on the map but adds stop-start driving through more towns, more roadworks, and sometimes worse surfaces that push consumption up even over a shorter distance. Running both routes through the fuel cost calculator with realistic consumption figures for each type of driving turns what used to be a gut-feel argument into an actual comparison, and more than once the "shorter" inland route has come out costing about the same or more once the driving conditions were factored in honestly rather than just going on distance alone.
Towing changes the numbers more than most people expect the first time they do this properly. A wagon or ute that sits around 10 litres per hundred kilometres unladen can jump to 16 or higher towing a loaded van into a headwind, which isn't a small adjustment, it can mean an extra fill-up or two across a trip that wouldn't have needed them unladen. If you're regularly switching between towing and not, it's worth running the calculator both ways before a trip so you know which set of numbers actually applies to what you're about to do, rather than using whichever consumption figure you happen to remember from the last trip, towing or not.
None of this is complicated, but it's the kind of thing that's easy to skip when you're focused on packing the car and getting the kids sorted before an early start. Fifteen minutes with the fuel calculator the night before means one less thing that can go wrong on a trip where plenty of other things, weather, road conditions, whether the caravan park actually has your booking: are already outside your control.
The trouble with fuel estimates most people do in their head is they use the number on the sticker or the one they remember from a good trip years ago, not what the car's actually using loaded up with camping gear, four people, and a roof pod catching wind the whole way. A ute or wagon that sips fuel around town at 9 litres per hundred kilometres can easily be using 12 or 13 once it's loaded and towing, or even just pushing into a headwind on the Warrego Highway for four hours straight. That difference between "sticker" and "reality" is exactly where people get caught out on the long stretches with nothing in between.
Our actual process now starts before we've even packed the car. We work out the real trip distance using whatever mapping app gives the most accurate reading for the actual route, not the straight-line distance, because outback roads rarely go in a straight line and detours around flooded causeways or roadworks add up. Then we use the trip fuel cost calculator at https://freeonlinetools.au/tools/trip-fuel-cost-calculator.php with a fuel consumption figure we know is realistic for loaded, towing conditions, not the number from the fuel economy label, which is measured in conditions nobody actually drives in. Put in the distance, the consumption rate, and current fuel prices, and it gives you total litres needed and total cost, which does two jobs at once: tells you the budget for fuel money, and tells you roughly how many fill-ups you're looking at across the trip.
The fill-up count matters more than the total cost most of the time, because that's what tells you whether you need to plan around specific towns. If the numbers say you need three tanks to get from Brisbane to somewhere out past Longreach, you start looking at the map for where those three fill-ups actually need to happen, and whether any of those towns have servos that are open when you'll be rolling through, plenty of small-town servos in the west close well before dark, and some aren't open Sundays at all. Knowing you need fuel roughly every 500 kilometres means you plan the day around servo towns rather than hoping one turns up when the needle's getting low.
We build in a buffer too, and this is the bit that's saved us more than once. Whatever the calculator says for litres needed, we treat that as the minimum, not the plan, because headwinds, air conditioning flat out in January heat, overtaking road trains, and towing all push consumption up from whatever baseline number you used. Tony's rule of thumb after enough trips is to add fifteen to twenty percent onto the calculated fuel need for anything remote, and to never let the tank get below a quarter full once you're past the last town with more than one servo. It sounds overly cautious sitting at home planning the trip, and feels completely reasonable once you're actually out there with red dirt either side of the road and the next town showing 140 kilometres on the sign.
Fuel prices are the other variable worth checking rather than assuming, because they swing more between regional towns than a lot of people expect, sometimes twenty or thirty cents a litre difference between towns only a couple of hours apart, particularly the more remote you get. Running the calculator again with updated prices once you've got a rough idea of the route helps set actual expectations for what the trip will cost, rather than being surprised at how much cash disappeared into the tank by the time you're back home going through receipts.
The other habit worth mentioning, separate from the calculator but connected to it, is actually tracking real consumption against what you calculated once you're on the road. Reset the trip meter at each fill, note the litres it actually took and the kilometres actually covered, and you'll quickly build a real picture of what your specific vehicle uses loaded versus unloaded, city versus highway, towing versus not. After a few trips you stop needing to guess at all because you've got your own numbers from your own car doing exactly this kind of trip, which beats any number on a manufacturer's sticker every time.
We've also started using the calculator to settle an argument that comes up every time a trip's being planned, coastal route versus inland route. The coastal way is usually longer in kilometres but often better roads and more consistent speed, while cutting inland can look shorter on the map but adds stop-start driving through more towns, more roadworks, and sometimes worse surfaces that push consumption up even over a shorter distance. Running both routes through the fuel cost calculator with realistic consumption figures for each type of driving turns what used to be a gut-feel argument into an actual comparison, and more than once the "shorter" inland route has come out costing about the same or more once the driving conditions were factored in honestly rather than just going on distance alone.
Towing changes the numbers more than most people expect the first time they do this properly. A wagon or ute that sits around 10 litres per hundred kilometres unladen can jump to 16 or higher towing a loaded van into a headwind, which isn't a small adjustment, it can mean an extra fill-up or two across a trip that wouldn't have needed them unladen. If you're regularly switching between towing and not, it's worth running the calculator both ways before a trip so you know which set of numbers actually applies to what you're about to do, rather than using whichever consumption figure you happen to remember from the last trip, towing or not.
None of this is complicated, but it's the kind of thing that's easy to skip when you're focused on packing the car and getting the kids sorted before an early start. Fifteen minutes with the fuel calculator the night before means one less thing that can go wrong on a trip where plenty of other things, weather, road conditions, whether the caravan park actually has your booking: are already outside your control.
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