I filled up my tank for $64.30 this week.

"Big deal," is what some American drivers might respond. People in the USA with trucks or big cars might fill up their tanks for half as much again. But I don’t live in the USA and I do not drive a big car. It is a four cylinder Daihatsu with about a ten gallon (US) gas tank. And on this particular occasion I filled 8.28 gallons into my tank and paid $64.30 for the fill-up. The liter price at my local gas station (about half a mile from my small apartment) was 1.589 € per liter, and I bought 31.37 liters, which works out to be 8.28 U.S. gallons. And at an exchange rate of $1.29 to 1.00 € that amounts to $7.74 for a gallon of gasoline. I used to buy regular gas but most gas stations in Germany stopped selling it after they adjusted the price to make regular gas the same price as premium. Once the prices had been the same for a while, they eliminated regular gas with the argument that it cost the same anyway as premium and any car that runs on regular will also run on premium. The price of gas at my local station is often changed several times a week. When I took this picture a little later (I had to get my camera), they had dropped the price to 1.56 € per liter. As expensive as the price at the pump has gotten, I am actually paying 7 cents a gallon less than I did when I wrote my last report on the price of gas at my local station four years ago. In the meantime the price of gas here has gone up about 15 percent, but the euro has dropped in value relative to the dollar.