Shocking: here’s the fuel price for cars with foreign licence plates – one exception
Starting from Friday midnight, cars with foreign licence plates cannot buy fuel at the capped price of HUF 480. There is one exception, though.
The new regulation
Gergely Gulyás announced at Thursday’s Cabinet Briefing that from Friday, cars with foreign licence plates will be banned from buying fuel at the HUF 480 (EUR 1.22) price. The decree was published in Magyar Közlöny at 11:59 pm last night. This meant that petrol stations had two minutes to figure out how to operate under the new rules.
As Blikk reports, the most important rule is that
from Friday, only cars with Hungarian registration plates can buy petrol or diesel at the official price of HUF 480 per litre.
There is one exception
However, the government decision also made an unexpected exception.
If fuel is officially priced (hatósági áras) in a foreign country, the car with the registration number of that country can also fill up with fuel at the official price in Hungary,
provided that the car with a Hungarian registration number can fill up at the official price there. The list of countries concerned will be published in a decree by the minister responsible for foreign policy, according to a summary of the provision published in Magyar Közlöny late on Thursday.
In other words, where there is also an official price for fuel, and it applies to Hungarian drivers, cars from that country will be able to benefit from the HUF 480 capped price. This means that, right now, cars with Serbian and Slovenian registration plates may form an exception.
Official price of fuel in Slovenia and Serbia
According to Blikk, in Slovenia, the price cap came into force on 10 May: the Slovenian Ministry of Economy set the retail price of EuroSuper 95 at EUR 1.560 and the wholesale price at EUR 1.540; the retail price of EuroDiesel is at EUR 1.668, and the wholesale price is at EUR 1.648. In Serbia, the government sets a monthly ceiling for the new fuel price: currently, the EuroSuper is EUR 1.528, and the retail price of EuroDiesel is EUR 1.715.
The last “foreign raid” on petrol stations
According to a Telex reader, half an hour before midnight, there was a queue of cars with Slovak licence plates at a Győr petrol station: they were waiting to fill their cars with fuel at the official price. Meanwhile, the station workers had no idea how they would technically manage the two prices. Their first decision was to turn away foreigners and not allow them to fill up at all after midnight.
Source: Blikk, Telex, Magyar Közlöny