What's New On MapQuest Gas Prices?

When we launched MapQuest Gas Prices last year we didn't know how popular it would be with our users. We knew gas prices were very topical, but we received a lot of great feedback and suggestions for new features. We took all those requests and merged them with features that we had already planned to do and started version 2.0 of MapQuest Gas Prices.

Here's a list of the new features that we added:

• Gas Price Calculator - Allows you to input your trip length, gas price from the station you're going to fill up at and the miles per gallon your car gets. Once you do that you receive an estimate of what a trip will cost you in terms of fuel. So, for example, if I drive from San Diego to Los Angeles (121 miles) and my car gets about 28 MPG and the cost of gas is $2.94, I can easily find out that my trip will cost $12.71.

• Drag to Pan Maps & Aerial Images - While MapQuest.com had the latest map interface when we launched MapQuest Gas Prices, we were deadset on using the same API product as our Platform Services customers on MapQuest Gas Prices so in this version we are using the latest Enterprise Edition

• Browse by State & City - We recognize that not everyone wants to search. Some users like to browse through all the options. So we've created hundreds of pages that allow you to browse fuel types by state and drill down by city.

• Alternative Fuels - Lots of people have heard about BioDiesel and E85 Ethanol and in some states like California electric charging stations are available for plugin hybrids and 100% electric cars. Even if you don't have a car that runs on alternative fuel you might be curious to see where you could find this fuel nearby. We reached out to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to obtain listings of all the locations that offer alternative fuels.

• Expiration on Gas Prices - Oil Price Information Service (OPIS) is the data provider that gives us all the gas and diesel prices that we show on our site. We update our site seven times a day to bring you the latest prices, but not every station sends in updates everyday. We found out that sometimes the lowest price was just an old price. That can be a real bummer if you drive there to purchase cheap gas. So we're removing old prices from the site. Any price older than 48 hours no longer shows up in the search results and is not factored in when we show the lowest prices on the map or search results. If you want to see that price, you can click the station name.