I wouldn’t say I’m wasteful with money, but I normally don’t pay close attention to gas prices. When my tank is low and I have a decent way to go, I fill it up at whichever station is nearest. But when the average price of regular soars past $4 a gallon, even those of us who ordinarily aren’t very strategic about where we fill up change our tune. Conveniently, two engineers have built an AI-powered system that uses a combination of user-submitted data and smooth-talking robocallers to index gas prices across the country and help us find the lowest price at the pump.
Appropriately called “The Gas Index,” the project started as a tool to track the price of a pint of beer, of all things, in Ireland. (It was called the “Guinndex.”) As it turns out, how much beer costs, like so many things, is to some degree tied to how much oil costs. Naturally, engineers Matt Cortland and Jon Fleming expanded their efforts to cover gas in the U.S., and what they’ve built is arguably the most sophisticated tool of its kind.
The Gas Index allows you to add your vehicles and location to an account, so that when it serves up the cheapest gas, it’s automatically factoring in how far you’ll have to drive to get it, how thirsty your car is, and what octane it requires. According to its calculator, it’s $6.14 cheaper for me to drive 25 minutes to a Sheetz than to fill up at the station around the corner from where I live. It also puts the money that wartime is costing you and I into real terms, comparing the average price of a tank before February 28 to today, and rattling off how much that is in milk, toilet paper, Dunkin iced coffees, Bud Light cans, or whatever proxy for economic health you prefer.
There’s another reason why this particular database is worth bookmarking. See, Google Maps only monitors prices at a little less than half of the country’s gas stations; those in more remote locations or independently owned tend to be left by the wayside. The Gas Index uses Google data for the big chains, but the only way to ascertain what the little guys are charging is to go there yourself in person and find out, which the site supports; just snap a photo with your phone of a station’s pricing board, send it to the site, and their AI will comb the pic and do the rest.
But there’s another way to gather prices for these mostly off-the-grid stations: good, old-fashioned phone calls. Maybe “old-fashioned” isn’t the proper adjective, because The Gas Index uses conversational AI agents (named Hank, Peggy, and Bobby, though they don’t sound like the Hills you know) to ask about prices over the phone, and then feed that data back into the network.
Apparently, the most challenging state to do this in is New Jersey, as Cortland and Fleming tell it, because Wawa has a strict policy against disclosing prices over the phone. (And let me just say, as an Eastern Pennsylvanian, that Wawa needs to get its act together. It’s completely lost the plot with a deluge of menu items nobody asked for, and should start working for the people again. But anyway.)
As of the start of the month, The Gas Index had polled more than 170,000 gas stations around the country, with 19,000 of them dialed up by Hank, Peggy, and Bobby. The devs say that only 1 in 700 station employees told the Hills “to fuck off” instead of answering their questions. Come to think of it, that might be another blocker in the Garden State. Check it out at gasindex.ai.
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