This weekend I made a road trip to NYC (I'll be talking about it later in future articles) from Montreal, QC. The most noticeable point when you drive from one country to the other one, apart from the U.S. customary units and the metric system, is the gas price. In this short article, I will do a quick summary of how these compare and how to correctly understand the difference between both.
Gallons vs. Litres, Miles vs. Km, USD vs. CAD
Basically, this is what messes up all the math on top of the exchange rate. On one side we have:
- Miles, gallons and U.S. dollars
while on the other one we have:
- Kilometers, liters and Canadian Dollars.
Basically, 1 Gallon = 3.78541178 liters, something that people simplify with "1 gallon = 3.8 l" or "1 gallon ~ 4 l". It will help you do the math faster whenever you need to "calculate in the air." It happens to me a lot that I get to a gas station in the U.S., and you have to fastly select how many USD of gas you want (usually by pre-authorizing the amount for the Credit Card or the cash). Keeping the conversion at the rate of 1 gallon = 4 l will help you do it faster.
The Numbers for Today
The previous relationship is fixed. A gallon will always be the same amount of liters no matter what. Now, the gas price and the exchange rate will always vary. This is why I picked up the numbers for today, June 27th, 2018:
- Montreal, QC (Petro-Canada): 1.449 CAD/liter
- USD to CAD flat exchange rate: 1 USD = 1.33425 CAD
Now, let's calculate the CAD price per liter in the U.S.:
- Champlain, U.S. (Irving): 2.99 USD / gallon
- 2.99 * (1.33425 CAD) / gallon
- 3.9894075 CAD/gallon
- 3.9894075 CAD / ( 3.78541178 liter )
- Champlain, U.S. (Irving): 1.05388 CAD/liter
So, we can say that today, the price difference is a 37.5% less expensive to fuel up on the other side of the border if you are traveling to the U.S. or returning to Canada from there.
