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JustinC
Joined: 10 Mar 2012
Location: We Are The World!
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 Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2012 1:52 am Post subject: |
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Most converters say you will get around 20% fewer miles per gallon because gas has less energy than petrol, so more like 25% less in the real world. Taxi drivers will be mostly in town but the most damage and highest fuel consumption occurs with cold engines on short trips (to school, the local shops etc), so if they drive sensibly they shouldn't be using more than city driving figures released by the manufacturers.
So if a petrol driver was getting 20mpg in the city they'd get 15 with LPG, but pay a lot less than 3/4 for fuel. LPG is around 1,090 won and petrol is a record 2,017.6 won. If they're spending 50,000 a day on fuel the savings over the life of a car will be pretty substantial. |
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Died By Bear
Joined: 13 Jul 2010
Location: On the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
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| Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2012 2:15 am Post subject: |
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| Don't forget to add in all the money they make from stuff/wallets/etc. that people leave in their taxis - especially the drunkards. |
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b-class rambler
Joined: 25 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2012 4:13 am Post subject: |
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| JustinC wrote: |
So if a petrol driver was getting 20mpg in the city they'd get 15 with LPG, but pay a lot less than 3/4 for fuel. LPG is around 1,090 won and petrol is a record 2,017.6 won. If they're spending 50,000 a day on fuel the savings over the life of a car will be pretty substantial. |
Yes, it'd be fair to say that LPG doesn't look anywhere near such a bad deal when compared with petrol rather than diesel....especially when you take the example of the most expensive petrol you can find.  Most petrol stations I pass every day are in the low 1900s or high 1800s for a litre of petrol at the moment.
However, whilst the manufacturer's figures never give you much of an idea of how much worse than their numbers your consumption will be when you're doing only urban driving on congested city streets whatever fuel you're using, just about all the real world evidence shows that LPG suffers a bigger fuel consumption hit for stop/start city driving with constant spells of hanging around stationary like taxis drivers have than the others do.
A few years ago, when buying a new car, I seriously considered getting an LPG car and did a lot of research into what fuel consumption people driving LPG get in Korea. For the 2.0 litre LPG car I was considering (same size engine as most taxis), many people reported that their daily commute would get them 5km/l. There were plenty of people who were reporting figures as low as 3km/l when they were stuck in traffic jams a lot. This is all completely consistent with what a handful of people I personally know, or have spoken to, have said about their LPG cars.
So I'm sorry, but your guess that LPG city driving would get you 3/4 of the MPG of an equivalent petrol car is simply not realistic. It's more likely about half. Which means there's next to no saving for taxi drivers, if any at all when compared with petrol.
But why just compare with petrol? Diesel absolutely blows LPG out of the water for fuel economy. In a diesel car of that size, you'd generally get at least 11-12 km/l for city driving. Even knocking it down to 10km/l to take into account the even less economical nature of taxi driving, that's still 3x better than LPG for just over 1.5 times the price.
As I said before, taxi drivers may well be lucky/have it easy in other regards. But anyone who reckons they get the best deal they could on fuel has no idea what they're talking about. |
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JustinC
Joined: 10 Mar 2012
Location: We Are The World!
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| Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2012 11:42 pm Post subject: |
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I got the petrol price off the internet, the same as all of the other facts I put in my post. One page was the testimonial of a driver who switched - he said he got 23% less miles. The manufacturers say a 20% reduction, an advice site said 20-25%.
Another site said the world's largest user of LPG is South Korea, which has 1.7 million LPG cars on the road. Another says LPG enjoys great popularity in Australia, The Netherlands, Italy, Serbia, Poland, Hong Kong.
There must be a reason for that? I reckon taxi drivers want to live in a cleaner society but don't want to pay out the kazoo for it. The price of LPG is actually coming down, petrol and diesel are going up.
Why would city driving be so much worse for LPG? Where does the physics change? You have the same mass of car, moving the same distance (or not, stuck in traffic so just turning the engine over). Diesel has slightly more bang for it's buck than petrol, petrol has 20-25% more than LPG.
I've looked and can't find anything online (from reputable sources) that back up your claims diesel is better than LPG/CNG. |
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b-class rambler
Joined: 25 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Fri Dec 21, 2012 2:31 am Post subject: |
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| JustinC wrote: |
I've looked and can't find anything online (from reputable sources) that back up your claims diesel is better than LPG/CNG. |
(By "better", I assume you mean gives better fuel consumption because that's all I've been saying here.)
To be honest, the above sentence gave me one of those spit the coffee on the keyboard moments and you surely can't be serious with that. For gawd's sake, even manufacturers' own figures for cars where they make both a diesel model and an LPG one make that crystal clear. 
To give you just one example - the Kia Carens. Kia's own figures are 7.7km/l for the LPG car. They don't sell the diesel version in Korea any more but when they did, their official figure for it was 13.2km/l. (I remember because it was a car I considered buying myself a few years ago.)
As I said above, the evidence of people actually driving the cars here shows that the difference between the different fuel types' mpg is in fact greater in practice.
My info comes from searching Korean sites like Naver and Daum for feedback and reviews on LPG fuel consumption. As you said yourself, there are quite a few LPG users in Korea, so there's plenty of info out there. As I was considering buying an LPG car, I spent a lot of time looking. If you don't believe me do a search yourself in Korean for LPG urban fuel consumption.
There must be a reason for the high number of LPG cars here? Well, the fact that taxis have to use it is clearly one of them. There are other obvious ones too like the fact that LPG cars are slightly cheaper to buy in the first place.
And I should add that my point was never that LPG was bad per se, merely that with their respective real world fuel consumption figures and their respective prices in Korea specifically, LPG doesn't save the driver much if any money at the pump compared to petrol, and costs considerably more per km driven than diesel. That's not a particularly controversial statement - from the evidence available in Korea it's a pretty indisputable fact.
In other countries, with pricing more in favour of LPG than in Korea it may well make a lot more sense. But that's not terribly relevant to the Korean taxi driver.
Incidentally, regarding petrol prices, this site is the best for that information in Korea
http://www.opinet.co.kr/index.do?cmd=main
As you can see on there, there isn't a single -gu of Seoul without filling stations selling petrol below W1900. The cheapest in Seoul is W1839 (as of 21st Dec evening). The cheapest in other parts of the country is even lower. Of course, there are more expensive petrol stations too. But it wouldn't require any more effort for a taxi driver to seek out the cheapest of the petrol stations than it requires them now to seek out the considerably less common LPG stations. So you really ought to have been comparing your LPG price with about 1850ish for petrol rather than the figure you used. |
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JustinC
Joined: 10 Mar 2012
Location: We Are The World!
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| Posted: Fri Dec 21, 2012 8:41 am Post subject: |
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What? You cite one car as evidence (but can't compare as it "isn't sold as a diesel anymore") and instruct me to research in a foreign language?
You say "My info comes from searching Korean sites like Naver and Daum" which is supposed to be better than mine, from sites by companies which get most of their income from fuel.
You have no evidence apart from your own experiences which, to be honest, I think you're making up.
You also implied people who disagreed with you have "no idea what they're talking about." And you talk about spitting out your coffee because my response was so absurd, but you cannot say which point wasn't correct.
You're just being argumentative. I will not engage you anymore. Good day, sir. |
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b-class rambler
Joined: 25 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Fri Dec 21, 2012 3:22 pm Post subject: |
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| JustinC wrote: |
| What? You cite one car as evidence (but can't compare as it "isn't sold as a diesel anymore") and instruct me to research in a foreign language? |
I cited the first clear example I could think of of a car that was sold in Korea with both LPG and diesel engines and one that I thought would be fairly well known to anyone who knows anything about cars & driving here. It was, until recently, sold as a diesel as well as LPG so the comparison is perfectly valid. The diesel figure I gave was the correct one. If it wasn't, you'd have been quite at liberty to find out and put me right on it. I could've used examples of other cars but I didn't wish to labour that point in an already long post. And you could've come up with an example to contradict what I was saying. That's what you should be doing if you're going to dismiss my point. But you haven't.
Research in a foreign language? Well, the topic here concerns driving in Korea and, as you yourself first pointed out, Korea is where the largest number of LPG drivers are, so the relevant information is obviously going to be largely in Korean. If you're completely unable to search for relevant info in Korean nor understand any of the mountain of stuff that can be found, then that's unfortunate and puts you at a considerable disadvantage, but it isn't anyone else's fault.
| JustinC wrote: |
| You have no evidence apart from your own experiences which, to be honest, I think you're making up. |
Nonsense. I never referred to my own experiences of LPG driving, just to those of many, many others. I didn't and don't claim to have any of my "own" experience of driving LPG. My research showed me that it didn't make much financial sense in Korea, so I didn't buy an LPG car. I know I sometimes ramble on a bit and I apologise for any lack of clarity on my part, but I think you need to take some responsibility for not reading very carefully there.
| JustinC wrote: |
| And you talk about spitting out your coffee because my response was so absurd, but you cannot say which point wasn't correct |
No, I said perfectly clearly what was wrong with that and your response in your last post suggested that you understood it, even if you complained about the example given.
| JustinC wrote: |
| You also implied people who disagreed with you have "no idea what they're talking about." |
I'm sorry if that really is the implication you took from that. It isn't what I said though and what was meant was people who argued in the face of pretty clear evidence in terms of what many people driving in Korean cities found in practice regarding fuel consumption and the actual prices of the different fuels in Korea.
I've no problem whatsoever with people disagreeing with any of my opinions. I'm less enthusiastic about people who don't read what I write properly or for other reasons misrepresent what I've said, or who try to ignore widely accepted and undisputed facts. But I remain happy to hear and respond to any relevant points you have to make on the issue, although personal disputes are perhaps better taken to a PM.
Whatever. merry Xmas to you too.  |
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JustinC
Joined: 10 Mar 2012
Location: We Are The World!
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| Posted: Fri Dec 21, 2012 5:08 pm Post subject: |
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| Merry Christmas! |
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wylies99
Joined: 13 May 2006
Location: I'm one cool cat!
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| Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2012 7:58 pm Post subject: |
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| A Seoul driver told me he makes 1.2 million per month. |
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DanseurVertical
Joined: 24 Nov 2010
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| Posted: Sun Dec 23, 2012 6:42 am Post subject: Re: How Much Do These Korean Taxi Drivers Really Make? |
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| Dodge7 wrote: |
| It can't be that much. Gas is outrageously expensive here. Anyone have a round figure? I feel bad throwing 2.300 at the guy for taking me a few kms. It seems like it should be more--at least 3k or so. I want to tip him but I don't want that to lead to the American entitlement attitude I see back home. Everyone has their hand out for something. Next you'll start seeing tip jars at Holly's Coffee. |
I've known a Korean girl whose father drove a cab. She mentioned this to suggest her family was relatively poor. But she had gone to a university whose students were mostly rich kids. So I don't know what was her point of comparison. No numbers to give. In general, the majority of the older generation did not attend college or university. We see them dressed up in public and maybe think otherwise, but always keep in mind that image these days is essential in Korea. |
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Swampfox10mm
Joined: 24 Mar 2011
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| Posted: Sun Dec 23, 2012 6:01 pm Post subject: |
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| newb wrote: |
| b-class rambler wrote: |
It'd be a mistake to think that because taxis run on LPG that this saves the drivers a fortune.
Yes, LPG is much cheaper than petrol and a little cheaper than diesel. But the other side of that coin is that LPG fuel consumption is terrible, especially for the kind of stop/start city driving that taxis do. So although it costs less to fill up an LPG car, that one fill-up will take you a fraction of the distance of the equivalent full tank of petrol or diesel.
Taxi drivers are required to run their cars on LPG. There may well be other things that taxi drivers are lucky with or have easy, but having to run their cars on LPG isn't one of them. |
Yes, but LPG or fuel for taxis and heavy trucks is government subsidized without the tax. So it's around 1000 won per liter for them |
As a former owner of an LPG car, I can tell you it's horrible. LPG is about 60% as efficient as regular gas. With one liter, I could travel about 60% the distance compared to regular gas. The savings in costs of buying LPG at the pump is totally useless, or a wash, at best.
An ModEdit on here also went on and on about the tax savings of owning an LPG car. There are NO such savings, because the reality is that LPG is also less powerful than regular gas, so you need a larger engine size to make the same power. Taxes are based on engine size, so I was actually paying HIGHER taxes.
* ModEdit for uncalled for and juvenile name-calling.
Consider this a warning. |
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Drew345
Joined: 24 May 2005
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| Posted: Sun Dec 23, 2012 7:06 pm Post subject: |
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| The got to make more than the Ajoshis selling stuff on the subways. I wonder how much they make. |
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