Fuelsearch. co. uk started their innovative service of alerting callers to the lowest prices in a 10 mile radius of their location in Britain last week and the company's founder is advancing plans to offer the service to Irish motorists.

"I came up with the idea as I do a lot of mileage all over the UK and keep noticing price differences between filling stations, " said Kevin Miller from Norfolk.

"I have lost count of the times that I filled up my petrol at one station and went down the road a short distance to find that the fuel was 5p cheaper at the next station.

"When you are filling your car with 50 litres or more three times a week you could lose over Stg£10 so that is why I decided to start the website to help motorists save money."

Fuelsearch have a database of all the garages in Britain and all their prices and they use these to find the cheapest petrol for motorists who sign up on their website.

"At the moment we have a database of all the garages in Ireland and we are working on developing a price list database for these garages so we can make our service available for Irish motorists within the next six months, " explained Miller.

As well as the text messaging service offered by Fuelsearch, they also allow motorists enter their postcode into a search system on the website and within seconds the site returns the 10 cheapest petrol stations within a 10 mile radius.

Motorists can also enter their journey route into the website and the search system will return a list of the 10 cheapest stations on the route to the motorist.

"We have signed a deal with all the major phone providers and so far we have been overwhelmed with the popularity of the service. As well as looking at advancing our service into the Irish market we are also looking into expanding it further into other countries, " said Miller.

The imminent arrival of fuelsearch. ie will no doubt get a huge welcome from Irish motorists as petrol soared to its highest ever price here last month.

The closure of many filling stations is expected to put more pressure on motorists in the winter months. The AA's monthly survey for August found that prices rose to an average 122.7c per litre of unleaded . . . up 5c on July.