Featured Image Credit: alvaro gonzalez / Tim Robberts / Getty
Planning a long car journey can be a bit of a pain these days, despite the ubiquity of apps like Google Maps or Waze.
While these services are generally very good at knowing when there's heavy traffic you should avoid or a cut-through you can take advantage of, they don't necessarily take gas prices into account.
Enter a new app that's finally coming to the UK after success in New Zealand. Its aim is to help road trippers save money by recommending routes - not just by speed, but also by the cheapest gas stations they go past.
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Roadtrip, the simply-named app, plans a route for you to your destination and then shows you the 10 cheapest gas stations along that route. You can then pick one or more that you'd like to stop at.
This will make sure that you know pretty much exactly what you'll be spending on gas, even before you leave home, so it can get rid of the need to guesstimate for yourself as you budget in your head.
Best of all, the prices it quotes for those gas stations are from live data, so you can be confident they're pretty accurate when you set out.
As quoted by iMore, the company said: "Using this data, Roadtrip shows which route would be the cheapest to drive, so you can decide if the scenic route is worth the extra petrol cost, for example."
This makes it a potentially great little money-saving tool, and given how gas prices have fluctuated in the last few years, every little helps.
With more than 4,000 petrol stations across the UK included in the app's directory, it's already a quite comprehensive offering, so could well be worth trying out.
The app is free to download from the App Store, but has some limits on how many routes you can plan, unless you pick up the £1 a month Roadtrip Pro subscription.
So, this could be a new entry into the competitive world of route planning - trying to chip away some of the total market dominance that Google Maps has built up over the last couple of decades.
Google has concentrated on other features like AI-enhanced options and user interface updates in recent years, but it'll be interesting to see whether it takes note of gas prices as something that its users are interested in.
