Sniffing Out Cheap Gas with Gashound

by Eric March on September 11, 2008 at 3:45 pm

If there’s one thing that conservatives and liberals, Americans and Canadians, Europeans and Asians — heck, most Earthlings can agree upon, it is that gas prices suck. This is probably only the third time in automotive history where we’ve had such high prices on fuel (other than the rationing during WW2 and the peak oil scare of the 1970s). People are doing whatever they can to save money on gas, from producing their own biofuel to converting their engines to work with alternative fuels — like the folks who converted their cars to run on vegetable oil, waste grease from restaurants, and even refined pig poop.

For everyone else who isn’t quite so inventive or industrious though, saving money on gas is all about hoping they’re within range of a cheap gas station — and if not, trying to find one in the areas you regularly find yourself in so you don’t spend more in gas getting to one than you save at the cheaper station. That’s not always the easiest thing to do, and if you venture outside your regular haunts you’re pretty much at the mercy of whichever gas station you eventually stop at.

Fortunately, the folks over at Somba Mobile would like to help you do something about that with Gashound. The primary function of Gashound is to find you the station with the cheapest gas in town. It can either hook into the iPhone’s Location Services to find one in your immediate area, or you can feed it a city & state or zip code and it’ll happily sniff out the best places to fill up in that region. If you’re on the go and using Location Services to sniff out cheap gas on the go, you can shake your device to refresh your current location to get the most local results. Using the zip code however I found brought results that tended to be too narrow, and often produced only one gas station within that zip code. In the future it should probably show results centralized around one zip and branching out to nearby zip codes.

The top results are ranked from cheapest to most expensive for the search region, and you can filter results by the type of fuel you need — regular, plus, premium, diesel, or E85. Ranked results all contain the name and address of each station, and can also be displayed on a map of the selected region so you can pin down exactly where the cheap stuff is in relation to everything else. (Hint: It’s usually the one furthest away from the more expensive ones.)

Prices are updated twice daily at around 6:30AM and 4:30PM — in plenty of time for morning and evening rush hours, though it does not say for which time zone. Nevertheless, that’s right around when stations change their prices anyway, so you can be assured of getting the latest pricing information across the board. That’s not always foolproof though, so if you spot a discrepancy you can report it with Gashound for the good of everybody else in your area. Hey, we’ve gotta stick it to Big Oil however we can, right?

The application does have a few minor issues. The inabiity to zoom in on the map view for a clearer view of station locations can be bothersome, but you can get driving directions if you double-tap on the desired gas station, so that kinda makes up for it. The map is also fairly slow to scroll, but that’s mainly a cosmetic issue. It also doesn’t work in Canada or overseas yet — but I do know that they’re working on that. Even if the map issues were the only complaints though, on the whole GasHound does work very well. It’s fast, the UI is clean and well presented, simple, intuitive and informative. It does what it says on the tin and does it well, and when it comes to finding cheap gas, that’s the most important thing.

I also know that Somba are working on adding some very interesting new features for future versions that I am not at liberty to talk about except to say that they will all be quite relevant to the overall purpose and will enhance and round out this application’s usefulness very nicely. One thing I can talk about though is Somba’s ulterior motive: Gashound’s long-term interest is in funding research in alternative fuels. To that end, Somba will be donating 5% of the profits from Gashound to clean, renewable energy research, which is ultimately what we should all be interested in. The closer we get, say, to being able to produce clean-burning, emissions-free hydrogen without having to burn fossil fuels in order to to power the electrolytic process required to make it, the better it will be for ourselves (cheap, renewable fuel we’ll eventually be able to make right at home from tap water) and the environment (the only emission from burning hydrogen is the same water that was used to make it).

Of course, if you’re looking for an opinion from someone who’s actually been able to make practical use of it (i.e. is located in the USA), iPhone, Therefore iBlog has done his own writeup on it as well.

GasHound is available now in the App Store for a measly $2.99, and with the potential savings on gas it could very well pay for itself in a couple of tanks — and do it while helping to fund clean energy research. It doesn’t get much more win-win than that. Note that this is only available in the US App Store for now, and while I normally like to kick developers in the shins who withhold the goodies from us Canucks, this one only makes sense, since it only works in the US (again, for now) and it’s entirely possible that overzealous international browsers who don’t read carefully enough (if at all) might end up with buyer’s remorse because it doesn’t work for them.