The car industry has linked buying new cars, which are undoubtedly more fuel efficient, to saving fuel and being 'greener'. But for most people the concept of spending $20,000+ to start saving money on fuel is, frankly, ridiculous. 

Yet there is plenty that ordinary motorists can do to save money on fuel, emit less CO2 and generally consume less - which will be increasingly important to

Safe handling and storage of petrol (gasoline)

Petrol deserves respect – and not just because it’s running out. Last month we went over the awesome destructive power the stuff. There are regulations about how you must store petrol, but it remains easy to catalyze disaster using perfectly legal quantities of petrol. (It’s why they’re suddenly so twitchy about passengers carrying liquids onto international aircraft.)

Click here for the full story on static electricity as a fuel fire hazard.

Here’s how not to dice with death using petrol.

hink you’re not an addict? Think again

One barrel of crude oil – 159 litres – represents the same ability to do physical work as 12 big, strapping slaves toiling 40 hours per week, for a year. It is, literally, 25,000 slave-hours, gift-wrapped. You can whip it out of the ground in Iraq for about $1.50 and sell it on the open market for a 5000 per cent mark-up without falling afoul of the human-rights regulators. And you can do it about 1000 times a second, 24/7. It’s a business with real

etrol and static electricity don’t mix. Here’s how to keep them apart

Find out how NOT to make a Molotov of yourself at the fuel pumpStatic electricity is the commonest cause of service station fires. This is not because motorists are closet pyromaniacs - it's because many are unwittingly stupid. Most of us underestimate the wickedly destructive potential flowing from the massive amounts of energy locked into conventional liquid fuels

Diesel car sales have for years propped up a stagnant Australian passenger car market. In both the ‘private’ and ‘business/government/fleet’ sectors, petrol was responsible for the overwhelming bulk of the passenger car action – but petrol car sales have gone nowhere-to-backwards since 2005.

Diesel sales – we’re talking passenger cars here, not SUVs, 4X4s, light commercials or trucks – have grown more strongly than