The biggest problem imo is that any time just about any government official in any country in any continent anywhere on the planet says trust us there is no need to panic people cast their minds back to the previous times they have heard that and (rather naturally) go 'Yeah, right!' and so think to themselves 'better safe than sorry'.

The UK gov has done a U-Turn and said that they will grant 5000 temporary work visas to EU HGV drivers .... that expire on Christmas Eve. Quelle surprise the take up rate has been rather low.

BP met with the govt on Thursday, they said that supply levels were roughly at the level they had been since the start of the summer, low but manageable. Allegedly, they said they were only closing 10 or their 1,200 locations. They also said stock was low below normal levels.

Someone leaked this information to the media for the Thursday night news (it is very unlikely that it was anyone but the RHA). The person who did this left out several important details, in particular the fact that BP planned to close almost no locations. BP briefed the media later they were closing 20 (it was assumed initially that they were behind the leaks as the initial report was that the meeting was lobbying to lift visa rules, it seems not to have been the case). Other retailers briefed they had no issues with stock at all. Too late.

And the reason why people suspect the RHA is because they have been lobbying aggressively for most of this year to change visa rules. Visa rules were changed for them a few hours after this all kicked off (they also did poultry workers, this group have been working closely with RHA on lobbying)...this alone should suggest who is responsible.

RHA are, however, not backing down. This is not surprising as they are traditionally one of the most combative lobbying groups (the BMA is the other, SMMT has quietened down, NFU is combative but prefers to operate in the shadows when they are in govt). But, given that their lobbying has been successful, it is notable that they are continuing to push hard for further concessions (their line has modified ever so slightly though, they are talking about improving conditions...although they still sound quite angry that some HGV drivers are being offered £50k packages).

Unfortunately, lobbyists have worked out they have the media and the public in the palm of their hands. The outrage cycle in the UK has become rapid. After May folded to Nissan/SMMT (another lobbying group), lobbyists have realised there is a lot of money in briefing aggressively against the govt with a very pliant media (the RHA has been most aggressive by far, and has aligned itself with the big food lobbyists too). Brexit is inevitably part of this: 95% of journalists voted Remain, and there is a subset of the population who read a lot of news and talk about nothing but Brexit (if you are from the US, it is basically: what Trump did to Dems, what Obama did to Reps...it is non-stop).

EDIT: I made an error. The actual date of the govt meeting is not clear. Shapps may have said it was ten days ago, I am sure I read somewhere else it was on Thursday...I don't know. If it was ten days ago, that is obviously...unusual because the leak, most likely, wasn't accidental but premeditated. BP have completely washed their hands of it and claimed they weren't operating in the media on Friday morning...I don't quite believe that.

What? This is a stocks and flows problem. If everyone filled up to the brim every time, but followed the same pattern of use otherwise, the weekly fuel consumed is exactly the same (modulo some tiny loss of efficiency due to cars being marginally heavier).

Of course a nation of half-full cars suddenly filling them to the brim demands much more fuel during the (short) period of time over which they make that transition, but that shouldn't create an expectation of drastically increased future _consumption_ of fuel.

That assumes people fill up every week. Not everyone does, it really depends on the amount of driving they do and size of their tank.

> Of course a nation of half-full cars suddenly filling them to the brim demands much more fuel during the (short) period of time over which they make that transition, but that shouldn't create an expectation of drastically increased future _consumption_ of fuel.

Isn't that what's being stated? That there's no actual industry shortage, just a short term shortage and demand spiked unexpectedly for a day or two but to such a degree that the normal per-station reserves and delivery cycle was unable to cope? The expected result would be that the following days or even weeks (to a lesser degree) would see reduced demand, since it's less an increase or decrease in demand overall but really just a shift of some future demand to the present.

But to the broader point, perhaps I misread. I fixated on the ‘cannot be kept up with’ bit which I read as implying a change in expected future consumption, but I see could also be read as a referring specifically to the demand shock.

Perhaps I am missing something here, but are you referring to vehicles in this context? Is it not common to always fill your tank to the top?

Of course if you can't afford a full tank, and are living hand to mouth each month/week, then you are in the poverty trap where everything is a percentage more expensive for you overall.

Very nice calculation. The results were that by filling up two half tanks as opposed to fully topping off one can get an extra 3.5 kms, albeit with a time penalty for going twice to the gas station. Hardly worh it as just making the round trip to the gas station would probably eat up those kms. To this I would add the wear and tear on the car by having it run longer with a nearly empty tank, something which is not recommnded.

Found this[1] from a quick search.

[1] https://www.carsforsale.com/how-to/5-simple-reasons-to-keep-....

But so far this has happened 0 times since I have a car.

The main ideas are not to step on the gas pedal more than say, 30%, and use the smallest car for the job.

Besides, you don't want your fuel aging more than 6 or 12 months. So, if you drive less than 40 miles per month (as in a pandemic), it can make sense to just fill up 1/2 way or 3/4.

Building a small financial buffer would likely improve their situation a great deal. It seems likely that it isn't always the case that the lack of buffer is a choice...

But if you supposed that everyone drove normally until their tank was 1/8 full then refuelled to the top, the average tank would be 7/16 full so if lots of people refuel all at once that is 9/16 times a lot of fuel tanks.

Luckily I don't have to be concerned with what someone who can't notice that believes: it falls to you to explain why there are so many lightweighting products on the market. Why do BMW offer a carbon roof that reduces weight by 5kg? Why did pre-refill-ban F1 only do partial refills? Why do rally co-drivers sit lower than the drivers?

Sorry, extremely minor nit-pick but I think the fractions go the other way. The average tank should be 9/16 full leading to 7/16 of a tank extra per person.

Depends. When I am in a hurry I buy fuel for an exact amount of cash, so that I can hand over cash and move on.

When I am not, I fill up to the first click[1], and then wait for the attendant to amble on over with a payment terminal so I can use my card.

If I was always paying cash, I would never fill up because I don't really want to hang about while they make change for whatever money I give them. [1] I had a 1986 BMW 525e that, if you filled up to the very top, will leak out excess fuel through an overfill pipe when on a slight (or not so slight) incline. Filling up to the top wasted that fuel.

Jokes apart, in Europe the gasoline is so expensive that you need ~80€ to fill up a small car. For an SUV can be close to 100€.

So we just fill up to just what is absolutely necessary and then we live in anxiety :)

When we lived in Europe in the 90s, my mother would never fill up past a quarter tank.

Many times youth is also splitting gasoline costs for a night out, so everyone will chip in 2-3€ to pour enough gasoline.

Also, it's very common to buy round amounts of value e.g. £30 of petrol, periodically, rather than just fill it up for however much that costs, for some people this makes it easier to think about from a budget point of view.

I always fill to the brim, as I value my time more than the incremental value that half a tank of gas will do for me. Obviously it's not the same for everyone.

The fill it up to the brim meme seems to come from emergency preparedness folks like the police and the army where no vehicle goes to the parking space overnight without being 100% as ready as it can be for tomorrow.

Much fewer proportion of people are driving those peugots or other tiny cars where the weight of fuel would be material relative to the time it would take to fill up fuel more often.

Another British thing that amazed me was their auto insurance prices were based on engine size, and they were fretting about the insurance cost between 2L and 3L cars, and all the vehicles we had in America were 4L+.

In 2019, the average new petrol ("gas") car in the UK requires 5.7 l of fuel per 100 km (49.2 mpg) [1].

The corresponding figure for the US is ~9.44 l/100km (24.9 mpg [2,3]).

We really, really need to decarbonise our economy worldwide and in many ways this fuel scare may be the catalyst required, with UK autotrader saying it was driving people to e-car retailers [4].

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/energy-a...

[2] https://www.iea.org/reports/fuel-consumption-of-cars-and-van...

[3] https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2021/sep/27/uk-pet...

The spoils of a government that does not have a high fossil fuel tax.

My most recent car was 1.1L and was fine for anything I used it for...

I do agree that basing insurance on engine capacity is odd though. Why not power to weight ratio or something?

Do European cars have gigantic fuel tanks?

40kgs is 40 / 0.71kg/L = 56.3L ~= 14.9 gallons.

14.9 gallons is as much, or more than any car I own carries. And I've never put more than 13 gallons into any vehicle ever during a single fill up.

To have that kind of "spare" capacity beyond what would be necessary for my daily commute, I'd need to be driving a large SUV or pickup truck.

I looked up a 3 Series BMW, and they have 40L or 57L tanks in the new models. Down from 60 or so 10 years ago.

I feel like 20kgs is a more accurate number. And that's really the difference between a small woman and a medium sized man driving the same vehicle.

I guess the question is how much does moving 20kg extra cost you over 20k km?

There are a number of factors at play including delayed testing because of covid, relatively low wages, and perhaps drivers shifting to more local deliveries e.g. supermarkets post covid due to changing demand. I was speaking to a taxi driver who said the taxi industry was being decimated by this

Yes, though Europe is a larger "network." I think it's a bit like Metcalfe's law. Even if the EU has similar shortages of labor or goods, the larger number of citizens and companies allows things to flow to and from wherever they're needed more easily. The UK is now a separate far smaller system no longer plugged into that larger network.

Those are Human beings that have to be, in essence, "stolen away" from another job, in the case of high school graduates (or whatever you call them) from another potential career. That's why wage isn't the magic wand many people believe it to be. If one industry increases wages (provided they can afford it), another gets the short stick. Unless you "steal" workers from other countries. As the UK did/does successfully for example with health workers...

So yes, while there is a wider issue, the wider issue is not the current problem or the high-order bit.

Note also that UGKOV plans to address the driver shortage by offering to ease restrictions on non UK-based (i.e. EU) drivers.

So yes, this is totally due to Brexit.

Hard to imagine why they might not be jumping at the chance to spend another Xmas with no access to sanitation or even food in a place that is run by people who abuse them publicly every day

This problem has been brewing for decades as the jobs have been outsourced to low cost countries and the drivers mercilessly exploited. Now that some economies have improved and COVID has hit a lot of those drivers are either unavailable or simply unwilling to travel so far and so long in horrible working conditions for so little reward.

Society needs to recalibrate the value of workers who do manual work. There really is no good reason why the average software developer should be paid more than an HGV driver while enjoying much better working conditions.

See https://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Software_Developer/..., https://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Heavy_%2F_Tractor-T..., https://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Delivery_Driver/Hou...

There really is. Computers will blindly obey orders 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and can be scaled pretty much indefinitely. So those capable of giving computers orders are in a position to do a large amount of important work, with little effort.

Truck drivers can only do a relatively small amount of work at a given time. Trucks have a limit to the volume of weight they can carry, and the speeds that they may travel to carry it. Thus, their work per hour is capped to a very modest amount. Since there's no real efficiencies to be gained, the only way to improve wages for drivers is to increase the cost of goods by a proportional amount.

Replacing fuel delivery via truck with fuel delivery via pipeline would make things much more efficient, but seems like a waste of resources given that EVs are taking off.

It's not fair, but it is reality. Any profession whose labor cannot be augmented by technological efficiencies is likely going to face the same economic realities. They either go up-market and serve only those who can pay reasonable prices for their services, they get their wages and status slashed in a cut-throat environment, or they are displaced by an inferior, machine-driven replacement.

Reminiscent of Teresa May's "magic money tree" comment

- There is only really a "shortage" of about 100-150 tanker drivers in the entire country.

- The petrol shortage was caused by aforementioned hauliers association deliberately telling the press that there was about to be a massive fuel shortage. That wasn't true but triggered panic buying, provoking an artificial "crisis" that was used (successfully) to put pressure on the government to issue some visas to eastern European truckies.

- There are more vacancies for HGV drivers, but that's mostly due to a lockdown-induced backlog at the driver licensing authority, combined with many people who have HGV licenses not wanting to drive due to poor pay and conditions.

- Brexit isn't the cause of this (which at any rate came into effect at the start of the year), except via a rather tortuous route ... the people at the RHA who manipulated the public through the press are all notoriously and outspokenly anti-Brexit, and they unfortunately have a history of leaking, in fact their press guy is a former BBC journalist already known to the government for prior leaking. BBC is of course notoriously anti-Brexit culturally. Therefore it is very likely these people saw an opportunity to both make money by getting access back to cheap labour whilst simultaneously winning a propaganda victory by convincing everyone to blame Brexit.

- And in fact Brexit has allowed the government to rapidly adjust the criteria for licensing HGV drivers to help clear the backlog, which wouldn't otherwise have been possible under EU rules.

So that's the official line at the moment.

Workers aren't prevented from travelling because of Covid restrictions, but Visa restrictions do apply. Also it's not a good prospect to move to a country where you feel like you are on some kind of a migratory ejection seat...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl...

This is widely reported across a number of publications

Somehow it seems on these forums that any left leaning publication is immediately trusted but any right leaning one immediately distrusted.

The companies blame visa rules because they don't want to pay staff more. It is that simple (what people don't understand, even in the UK, these stories are all coming from a lobbying group of haulers...not drivers, the people who are having to pay staff more and are very angry about doing so, they just want the cheap labour back).

One of the companies that has had persistent shortages for months is a bread producer making £30m/year, they have 150 driver vacancies. I know someone who talked to a hiring manager there, they pay below market, they are experiencing massive attrition, when he asked what pay rises they were offering...2%, "the rise is satisfactory, workers should be happy"...meanwhile other firms are paying 10-30% raises, some HGV drivers are being retained on £50-60k salaries (this producer pays people £27k for multi-drop, starting at 2am, I believe it is mostly class 2 but their wages are a fantasy). Some firms in the UK have glutted themselves on cheap labour. They have no idea how to operate any other way (and btw, this bread producer is throwing away product every day because they don't have drivers, at no point have they tried to raise wages, they believe the low wage labour will return it seems).

Lots of truck drivers have left the industry after suffering years of poor pay and conditions. The licencing scheme is not so simple that they can return on a whim either.

The resulting media-fuelled spate of panic buying overloaded normal delivery cycles.

There is plenty of product stored at the ports/refineries themselves.

Didn't the Colonial Pipeline attack have people filling up plastic bags with gas?

Cue fire brigade level intervention!

Lately far too many of these playbooks have been focused on suppressing the systemic mistreatment of the working class. Fuel isn't running low because we can't find enough truck drivers due to systemic underpayment and overwork; its low because people are panic buying. Schools cant find enough teachers not because of underpayment and overwork; its because of right-wing pushback against mask mandates, people are scared to return to the classroom. Hospital ICUs aren't overflowing because of a critical care staff shortage due to systemic underpayment and overwork; its because of the unvaccinated.

The unfortunate reality is, these public relations control strategies work because there is some element of truth to Their explanation. Rarely do problems boil down to one solution; and if They can keep focus on the one, small element of the problem that encourages Us to stay mad at each-other, They don't have to worry about solving the systemic issues, built-up over decades, which anyone with half a brain could have seen coming.

I'm confused, can't they just fill up jerry cans, or if garages aren't allowing this, just siphon the fuel out of the car at home?

I live in the American south and we had a gas shortage like this in the spring due to a ransomware attack. There were pictures on social media of people trying to fill up all sorts of nonstandard containers ranging from buckets to grocery bags (yep). But I think the people who would buy gas cans for this, or try such silly alternative storage methods, are a minority and most won't expend the effort to pursue additional storage capacity beyond their vehicle's tank.

I can't remember if this applies to limits you can transport in a vehicle or if it applies to storage at a home/work location as well.

Well, zero more likely.

Daddy Government will always provide, of course.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kkRX2p9wH4

..how is the government supposed to manage this? The messages have been "just buy fuel normally" - but people are ignoring it. It's the same problem as happened with toilet paper, people will start hording whatever is now limited.