Qatar cut the petrol price. Your choice of engine is worth fifty times more.

QatarEnergy set October's fuel prices on 30 September. Premium 91 came down five dirhams, from QAR 2.00 a litre to QAR 1.95. Super 95 held at QAR 2.10 and diesel at QAR 2.05 — so of the three grades, one moved, and it moved by two and a half percent.

Every outlet in the country ran the announcement. None of them ran the next number, which is the one that affects you: what five dirhams a litre is actually worth over a year of driving in Doha.

What five dirhams buys you

Take 20,000 km a year — roughly a 55 km day, which is a Doha commute with errands on top. At real-world consumption rather than the brochure figure:

• Toyota Corolla, four cylinders — About 7.5 L/100 km, so 1,500 litres a year. The cut saves you QAR 75.
• Toyota Prado, V6 — About 13 L/100 km, so 2,600 litres. The cut saves you QAR 130.
• Toyota Land Cruiser, V8 — About 17 L/100 km, so 3,400 litres. The cut saves you QAR 170.

A Land Cruiser's 80-litre tank costs QAR 156 to fill at the new price. The entire year's saving is one tankful.

The number that actually moves

Now the same three cars, but the whole fuel bill at QAR 1.95 rather than the discount on it:

• Corolla — QAR 2,925 a year.
• Prado — QAR 5,070 a year.
• Land Cruiser — QAR 6,630 a year.

The distance between the cheapest and the dearest of those is QAR 3,705 every year. That is forty-nine times what the price cut hands the Corolla owner, and twenty-two times what it hands the Land Cruiser owner. The grade on the pump is a rounding error next to the number of cylinders under the bonnet — and the cylinders are the part you choose once, in a showroom, and then live with for five years.

Put it over that span. Five years of petrol in the Land Cruiser is about QAR 33,000. Five years in the Corolla is about QAR 14,600. The QAR 18,500 between them is most of the price of a used Corolla.

If you fill with Super 95, nothing changed

Worth saying plainly, because the headlines did not: only Premium 91 fell. If you put Super 95 in your car — because the handbook asks for it, or because you have always done it — your fuel bill in October is identical to September's. Diesel owners are in the same position, and on this site that is a small group: of the 11,218 live listings that state a fuel type, 91 are diesel.

What Qatar actually buys

We can answer that, because the catalogue is the answer. Of 13,532 cars listed on BuMotar right now, 8,462 state a cylinder count:

• Four cylinders — 3,741 cars — 44% of those that say.
• Six cylinders — 2,853 cars — 34%.
• Eight cylinders — 1,662 cars — 20%.
• Ten or twelve — 62 cars.

So 54% of the used market here — a clear majority — is six cylinders or more. That is not an accident of what dealers happen to stock: ten of the twelve most-listed cars on the site are large SUVs or pickups. The Land Cruiser is first with 1,607 live listings, then the Patrol with 562, the Range Rover with 411, the Lexus LX with 400 and the Pajero with 258.

The cars that would cut that bill are almost absent. Of the listings that state a fuel type, 134 are hybrid and 77 are fully electric — 211 cars, 1.9% of the market.

Petrol here is cheap enough that saving it does not pay for itself. That is the honest reason the hybrid share is 1.9% — and this month's cut just made it slightly more true.

Which is the trap in a month like this one. A five-dirham cut is a reminder that fuel in Qatar is cheap, and cheap fuel is exactly why the cheapest cars to run do not sell here. The arithmetic above is the counterweight: the saving on a four-cylinder is trivial per litre and substantial per year, and it keeps compounding while the price announcement resets every month.

What to do with this

• If you are buying — Work out the annual fuel bill before you compare the asking prices, not after. Over a five-year hold it moves the true cost of a V8 by roughly QAR 18,000 against a four-cylinder — enough to change which car is actually the cheaper one.
• If you are selling a four-cylinder — Put the consumption figure in the advert. Almost nobody here does, and it is the one number about your car that gets better every time petrol goes up.
• If you are selling a V8 — Price it on the car, not the running costs. Buyers in this segment made peace with the fuel bill before they started looking; what moves them is condition, service history and mileage.

Two things to be clear about, because they change how you should read the numbers. The consumption figures are real-world estimates for these models, not measurements we took — your own driving, the air-conditioning and Doha traffic will move them, almost always upward. And Qatar's fuel prices are reset at the end of every month, so the five dirhams can go back on in November as easily as it came off. The engine you buy does not reset.

Read next

• Half of Qatar's newest used cars are Chinese. Nobody can yet tell you what they are worth at five.
• What 1,057 Land Cruisers say about losing money in Qatar