All across the country and the globe, gas prices are high, so much so that Ford is now offering gas incentives to U.S. buyers, and many drivers are considering switching to EVs. But buying a new car is the last thing most of us need right now, and there’s a new AI-driven tool that may be able to help. As reported by The Drive, a tool originally designed by two engineers to track beer prices takes advantage of user-submitted data, crowdsourced photos, and robocalls (not all information is available on the internet) to find the lowest gas prices in a given area. With average prices well past $4 a gallon, this is a brilliant initiative.
The Gas Index Can Help Save Money on Gas
The tool was built by Matt Cortland and Jon Fleming and is called The Gas Index. While it began in Ireland with the name “Guinndex,” helping pubgoers find the cheapest pint of stout, the engineers have turned their idea into a complex but simple-to-use tool for U.S. drivers. All the user has to do is add their vehicles and location to an account, and then the tool works out where the cheapest gas price is, how far you have to drive to get to that station, how much fuel your car/s use, and what octane you need. The tool can also compare the average price of a full tank before the war in Iran began on February 28 and now. This information can then be used to tell you how many gallons of milk, rolls of toilet paper, or whatever else you could have bought with the additional money you now have to spend on gas. Naturally, the more users this tool attracts, the more accurate it will be, but it’s already better than Google at monitoring fluctuations.
AI-Powered Gas Index Is More Useful Than Google for Gas Prices
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Google Maps only keeps track of gas price trends at under 50 percent of gas stations countrywide, and while The Gas Index does leverage Google data for big chains, gas stations in less densely populated parts of the country and those owned independently require a little more info. To get it, the tool uses conversational AI agents to call gas stations for gas prices (though New Jersey is a challenge because Wawa refuses to share prices over the phone), but the community using this app can be just as helpful, if not more so. Users can snap a photo of the pricing board, send it to the site, and the AI can figure out the rest and turn that into useful information for everyone else. According to The Drive, the tool had already polled over 170,000 gas stations across the country at the beginning of April, 19,000 of which were reached by its phone calls. Remarkably, only one gas station in every 700 was unhelpful in answering the AI’s questions, so this tool is working. If you want to compare pricing and see how you can save on gas, visit gasindex.ai.
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