Amid soaring petrol prices and panic over petrol station outages, a popular fuel app is asking people to report information correctly to ease misinformation anxiety.
This comes after the price for petrol in Auckland hit $4 a litre for the first time since the outbreak of the Iran war three weeks ago.
In the past week, some fuel pumps have run dry due to the increased demand.
The average petrol price across New Zealand today is $3.29 per litre for 91, $3.49 for 95, $3.60 for 98 and $3.09 for diesel.
More than 200,000 Kiwis have flocked to the fuel app Gaspy to get a daily heads up on the price increases and station outages.
Gaspy spokesman Mike Newton outlined how users could report accurate information to avoid errors.
There has been confusion over whether consumer-reported outages and prices in the app are accurate.
“We already have a system in place. We can disable individual fuel types at any station, or we can disable entire stations, and they just won’t show up in the app from that point forward,” Newton said.
He said the problem is that, rather than the users contacting them directly when a station runs dry, “they’re taking things into their own hands”.
Gaspy users have reported unverified prices of $4 a litre at some stations, apparently as a way of signalling that those stations are out of fuel. There is no way to post directly on the app that a station has run out.
Newton said people should use the reporting feature within Gaspy.
“Just let us know which station it is, what fuel type it’s out of, and then we can make the updates on our end to basically show that,” he said.
“We’re looking to do a bit of a communications blitz with our users and send out emails and notifications, and just to let them know that that is the correct process,” he said.
Newton said it seemed like the outages were getting worse, and he didn’t think there was any respite in the near future.
“It’s going to obviously become a bigger problem, so we need to now get on top of it with the user base,” he said.
Newton said to verify reports of an outage, they are working towards connecting with the petrol companies.
“Unfortunately, they’re not telling us straight up if they’re out of fuel or not, but I mean, they’re pretty busy fighting fires of their own.
“I think we’re not really on their radar,” he said.
Newton said that with the influx of new users, there are some people who are putting in the wrong information accidentally.
“The advantage of having everybody so active in the app at the moment is that if a price is wrong, it gets updated quite rapidly,” he said.
Yesterday, BP New Lynn was charging $4.039 for ultimate 98, one of its “top performance” fuels, and $3.649 for unleaded 91.
The Government is considering how it might prioritise fuel access as it prepares for the “worst-case scenario” in light of the Middle East conflict constraining global fuel supply and further increasing fuel prices.
Earlier this week, Finance Minister Nicola Willis urged people not to panic-buy fuel.
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