Around where I live, gas is super expensive, so I always try to plan my gas purchases to coincide with car trips out of town. I know where to find pretty cheap gas close to some of the destinations I frequent, but you know what? Pretty cheap is not cheap enough! Especially in these days of stratospheric gas prices, we need a way to find the very cheapest gas!

I wish there was an online tool that would let you quickly and easily find the cheapest gas along a particular route. It’s simple and convenient to plan out your trip using MapQuest or Google Maps, and it’s easy enough to find cheap gas using Gas Buddy or MSN Autos, but no tool I know of will both plot out your route and tell you instantly where the cheapest gas is along that route.

If you’re a software developer, please, please make a tool like this! I guarantee whoever does this first is going to make a bundle. I wish I knew how to do it myself.

Last year, when I drove from LA to Salt Lake City, my cheap gas strategy was to make a list of all the fair-sized towns I would be traveling through and to plug that list of locations into Gas Buddy to plan my stops for gas in advance. I discovered I could fill up cheaply in North Las Vegas and then again just outside SLC. I saved some money, but this was a big pain.

I’ve since found an easier way to do it. This way is not perfect and it’s still time-consuming and we still need a dedicated tool. But while the gears continue churning in the brains of all those software developers, here’s the best way to find the cheapest gas along your route:

Use AAA’s TripTik Travel Planner. TripTik is a map tool which is quite similar to Google Maps and MapQuest, only it displays all the gas stations along a particular route along with price information from OPIS (the Oil Price Information Service). This means its prices are generally more reliable than services which rely on user reports, such as Gas Buddy, though they do tend to be older.

As I said earlier, this tool will not, unfortunately, tell you instantly where the cheapest gas is along your route. But it’s not too difficult to do this yourself if you’re determined. After you enter your starting point and destination, you have to pull down the “Show” menu, select “Gas Stations,” and zoom in close enough that little “GAS” icons start to appear along your route, as in the picture below:

When you mouse over these little “GAS” icons, the prices will display, like so:

Finding the cheapest gas is a matter of mousing over every “GAS” icon close to the purple line that marks your route. It’s unlikely that going too far out of your way would benefit you (you’d waste too much gas getting to the gas station), so I wouldn’t bother with gas stations that aren’t immediately next to that purple line.

For a hypothetical 33-mile trip from Los Angeles to Santa Ana, it took me about two minutes to mouse over all the gas stations along the route, and the above represents the cheapest gas I could find. A price of $3.80 on regular grade gas is a savings of 15.5 cents per gallon off the current California average ($3.945 as of 5/15/08). I’d say that’s a pretty good use of two minutes!

Now if only somebody would find a way to automate this task, it would take zero minutes…!

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