Petrol just jumped 30c a litre — what can you actually do about it?

If filling the tank has felt worse lately, it’s not your imagination.

On 3 August the fuel excise went back to its full rate — 53.7c on every litre — as the temporary relief ended and the twice-yearly inflation adjustment landed on the same day. Against what you were paying in June, that’s about 30c a litre at the bowser once GST stacks on top. Add the oil-price premium from the Middle East conflict, which never really left, and capital-city petrol is averaging about $1.94 a litre.

We’re not here to argue about the tax. The relief was always temporary, and whether restoring it was right is a political question — not an energy one.

The energy question is better: what can you actually control?

How an energy manager reads a petrol shock

In professional energy management there’s a pecking order we’ve used twice before in our EV cost series:

Keep the energy flowing first. Cut the cost second. Green it third. Security, then cost, then sustainability — in that order, because the steps below don’t matter if the one above fails.

Look at this year through that lens and the whole excise saga makes sense. A security shock — war, oil — pushed prices up. The government reached for a cost lever, a tax holiday, to soften it. The holiday is now over, but the security problem it was patching is still there.

Transport fuel is the least secure energy your household buys — but let’s be fair to the comparison, because electricity isn’t immune. A good share of our power is still made by burning coal and gas, and gas prices track international markets. 2022 proved a fuel shock can reach your power bill too.

Follow the chain far enough and even electricity leans on liquid fuel: the trucks that mine the coal and the trains that haul it burn diesel, and in 2022 a WA power station actually shut down for want of coal. Nothing in the energy system escapes fuel entirely.

The difference is buffers — and your place in the queue. A power station keeps a coal stockpile in its own yard, and much of the fleet sits beside its mine; your servo gets a tanker every few days. Australia has also had a fuel-rationing law on the books since 1984: in a declared shortage, essential users — freight, farms, the supply chains behind the grid — get priority, and motorists get rationed at the pump. In a long enough fuel drought the lights would eventually flicker. Your tank goes empty long before that — by design.

Price works the same way. Petrol is world oil plus tax — a shock lands at the bowser within weeks, almost undiluted. Your power bill is a blend: poles and wires, domestic generation, a slice of internationally-priced gas. Shocks arrive diluted, when they arrive at all. That’s why the same crisis that put 40c on a litre of petrol saw most households’ regulated electricity prices fall in July.

And one slice of the electricity system is more secure than anything else on this page: the panels on your own roof. Intermittent, sure — the sun keeps its own hours — but they’re the only energy a household can make itself. Worth remembering when we get to the garage.

So take the hierarchy personally. Security first, cost second.

What the jump actually costs you

For an average driver — 12,000 km a year — the excise restoration alone, against the June rate:

Your car	Extra per year
Small/efficient (6.1 L/100km)	~$220
Mid-size SUV (9.0 L/100km)	~$325

That’s just the tax step. The war premium on top is another ~37c a litre versus pre-conflict prices — which nobody controls, and nobody can promise you won’t widen again.

Security first: don’t get stranded

Redundancy is the boring secret of energy security. A household that can draw on two fuel networks is harder to strand than one that depends on a single supply — whatever that supply is.

Three practical moves, cheapest first:

• Keep the tank above half in a jumpy market. It costs nothing and converts a supply scare from an emergency into an inconvenience.
• If you’re choosing between petrol and diesel for a household car, choose petrol. This one has numbers behind it. Australia runs on diesel — we use about twice as much of it as petrol, it powers the freight, mining and farm sectors that can’t stop buying, and we import about 87% of it, more than any country on earth. When supply tightens, diesel gets bid first: through this crisis, wholesale diesel rose 63.8c a litre while petrol rose 36.8c. And there’s a legal kicker: under the rationing law above, the priority users in a real shortage overwhelmingly run on diesel. A household diesel car shares its fuel with the whole economy — and stands behind it in the queue. A petrol car mostly queues with other motorists. A tradie who needs a diesel ute needs a diesel ute — but for a family car, petrol is the less exposed fuel.
• A mixed garage is a genuine hedge. More on that below — it’s where the cost answer and the security answer turn out to be the same thing.

Cost second: the levers, ranked

The free ones. Petrol in the capitals moves in documented price cycles — the ACCC publishes when each city’s cycle peaks and troughs. Timing your fill against the cycle, and chaining errands into one trip instead of three, are the only fuel discounts that cost nothing.

The structural one. Per kilometre, electricity is much cheaper than petrol — that’s the finding of our hour-by-hour cost studies, and it just got stronger. We modelled petrol at $1.80 a litre; it’s now around $1.94, which adds roughly $100–150 a year to a petrol car’s bill and hands exactly that much extra advantage to anything that doesn’t burn it:

• In the hatchback study, the EV’s price premium was $800 and it paid for itself in about a year — the clearest “yes” our modelling has ever produced.
• In the mid-size SUV study, the EV premium is still ~$15,400, so the hybrid wins today’s maths — it banks most of the fuel saving for a third of the premium.

One rule survives every scenario we’ve run: this is replacement-time maths. Selling a working car early to dodge petrol prices doesn’t pay back — run it to the end of its life, then buy the efficient thing.

The honest bottleneck

EVs are cheaper per kilometre you charge at home. Long distances are the exception, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.

On a road trip, public fast charging runs 40–65c/kWh — up to ~85c on ultra-rapid units — and the network crunch lands exactly when every family travels at once, on the Easter and Christmas runs. A petrol car refuels in five minutes at any of thousands of stations. That’s not an argument against EVs. It’s an argument about which job each fuel is best at.

The energy manager’s garage

Put security and cost together and, for a two-car household at replacement time, the answer writes itself:

One EV, one petrol car. The EV does the daily kilometres — cheap, charged at home, cheapest of all if solar is filling it. The petrol car does the long distances, where refuelling in minutes beats planning around chargers. And you’re never one fuel-supply problem away from being stuck.

That’s not a compromise between the cost answer and the security answer. It’s both at once: the EV harvests the low running costs on the kilometres you drive every day, the petrol car covers the kilometres where EVs still queue — and the household ends up on two energy networks instead of one.

Two upgrades to that setup if they’re available to you:

• Charge the EV from your own roof. Solar turns cheap kilometres into nearly free ones — and if you’re eligible for a free midday power window, a car that’s home at lunchtime charges for nothing.
• Get on an EV power plan. Several big retailers sell overnight EV charging at 4.5–8c/kWh against a typical 36c flat rate. In our studies, this one phone call was worth more than most hardware.

The road-tax fine print

Two things worth knowing before anyone tells you EVs are freeloading:

• Petrol drivers pay road tax by the litre. At the restored 53.7c excise, that’s about 3.3c/km in an efficient hatch and 4.8c/km in a mid-size SUV.
• A per-kilometre charge for EVs is likely someday — none exists federally today. At the much-discussed ~3c/km, our model says it would claw back about half of an average driver’s EV saving. Half, not all: the EV stays cheaper to run, by a thinner margin. (It’s a toggle in our published model — and an optional field in our free hybrid vs petrol calculator, so you can stress-test it on your own cars.)

And sustainability?

Third, remember — and here’s the quiet good news: if you follow the security and cost logic above, the sustainability mostly happens by itself. The cheapest configuration — EV on daily duty, charged from solar where possible — is also the lowest-fuel one. You don’t have to choose between the pecking order and the planet. You just have to follow the order.

The verdict

• The 30c jump is real and mostly permanent — the excise is back to stay (it indexes again every February and August), and only the war premium can ebb.
• Security first: keep the tank half-full, prefer petrol over diesel for a household car, and value a two-fuel garage.
• Cost second: time the price cycle, and at replacement time run the EV/hybrid maths on the calculator with today’s bowser price in it — current petrol prices make our published numbers better, not worse.
• The two-car answer — one EV for the daily grind, one petrol for the long haul — is the rare move that wins on security and cost. Sustainability comes along for free.

Figures use the ATO’s published excise rates, ACCC price monitoring to early August 2026, and the sourced assumptions from our published EV cost models. Petrol prices move daily — your bowser will differ. Our EV studies and their downloadable model are linked above; change our assumptions to yours and check us. That’s the point.