*Please note that the app only calculates the price of trips in terms of fuel consumption. Car maintenance, insurance, and other extraneous costs are not a factor in the price of trips.
Get ready for a bit of math:
Automatic considers the distance, fuel efficiency, and value of gas in your tank to calculate how much your trips cost in gas.
For example, if a trip was 10 miles long with an efficiency of 20 miles/gallon, you used 0.5 gallons of gas. (10 miles ÷ 20 miles/gallon)
Next, the value of the gas in your tank is estimated in one of two ways: If your car’s computer reports its fuel level, Automatic looks up the price of gas when and where you fill up. Otherwise, it uses average local gas prices to estimate the value of gas in your tank.
If gas is $4/gallon, the 0.5 gallons you used on your trip cost $2! ($4/gallon x 0.5 gallons)
Our gas pricing data source gives us specific station-by-station prices, which is even more accurate than any sort of regional pricing. There is no national averaging.
When we cannot see where exactly you filled up, we run an estimate of where you filled up and base the price on the average of local stations. We currently do not take into account manually entered prices for fill ups, those are just for record keeping.