Market Transparency Unit for Fuels launches trial period with consumers

The Market Transparency Unit for Fuels will start operating today with four consumer information service providers. This will enable consumers to compare prices between petrol stations in Germany and choose the cheapest offers.

Andreas Mundt, President of the Bundeskartellamt: "From today price changes for the most commonly used types of fuel E5, E10 and Diesel will be reported to the Market Transparency Unit "in real time" and passed on to the consumer via consumer information service providers. Petrol stations will report all changes in price for E5, E10 and Diesel within five minutes to the Market Transparency Unit, which will then pass on this information at minute intervals to the consumer information service providers. For the first time consumers will be able to really compare prices and drive to the cheapest petrol stations in their vicinity or along a specific route. During the trial period and with the help of consumers, modifications will be made to the system in time for the Market Transparency Unit to start its normal operation on 1 December 2013.”

More than 13,000 of a total of around 14,500 petrol stations in Germany already report their prices to the Market Transparency Unit. The rest will be feeding in their price data within the next few days and weeks. Four authorised consumer information service providers have already successfully taken part in the test phase and are today launching their web portals. These are ADAC, clever-tanken.de, mehr-tanken.de and spritpreismonitor.de. A further eight consumer information service providers have already been authorised and will follow suit within the next few days and weeks. In all, the Bundeskartellamt has up to now received applications from almost 100 interested providers.

The Market Transparency Unit itself will not directly offer price information to the public. Instead, it will pass on the price data received to private consumer information providers, who in turn will inform the consumers.

The Bundeskartellamt will be using the Mobility Data Marketplace of the German Federal Highway Research Institute (BASt) as the platform for the reporting of price data to the Market Transparency Unit. The Mobility Data Marketplace already collects important traffic data and makes this available to consumers. As a result the installation of a new platform could be avoided and the range of data made available by the BASt expanded further.