GasBu Labs · AI research
We predict fuel prices before they move
GasBu watches more than 73,000 gas stations across Europe in real time. Right now our models focus on three markets — Spain, France and Italy — turning that firehose of 21 million recorded prices into the one answer that matters: fill up today, or wait.
Real data: Brent crude vs. the Spanish national diesel average, October 2024 – today. The shaded band is the Strait of Hormuz crisis of 2026.
EXP-01The FuelCast model
Will this station raise its price within 3 days?
For every station, every day, a gradient-boosted model reads 18 signals — the station's own pricing rhythm, what its neighbours are doing, the momentum of Brent crude — and outputs one probability. When we act only on the top 10 % most confident calls, they come true in 75–90 % of cases. Random guessing would get 21–58 %.
Each bar: how often stations flagged by the model actually raised their price (walk-forward test, the model never sees its test period). The tick is the base rate — what blind guessing achieves.
EXP-02A natural experiment
Then the Strait of Hormuz closed
On 2 March 2026 the world's most important oil chokepoint shut down and Brent jumped 65 % in a month. Governments scrambled — and every country reacted differently. For a prediction model this was a gift: a live stress test you could never design.
Brent rockets from $71 to a peak near $118. Pump prices follow within days — we measured the pass-through at ~0.90 and a 3:1 'rockets & feathers' asymmetry: price rises travel three times more willingly than drops.
Spain drops fuel VAT to 10 % and excise to the EU minimum (−23.5 c/l overnight — our data matched the legal theory to within 0.3 cents). Italy cuts excise by 20 c/l. France does nothing — a clean control group.
Both countries unwind their cuts in steps too small to spot by eye. We reconstructed the full tax calendar from legislation, subtracted VAT and excise from every price, and train all models on the clean, tax-free series.
Italy, diesel: three tax steps in one year (excise realignment in January, a 20-cent crisis cut in March, phased out by June). The dashed net-of-tax series — what our models actually see — has no artificial jumps left.
EXP-03Method
Honest numbers or nothing
Models are always tested on days they have never seen, exactly as they would run in production. No random splits, no leakage, no grading your own homework.
Every price is stripped of VAT and excise using the verified legislative calendar of each country. Models learn markets, not decrees.
Every model has to beat both a 'nothing changes' forecast and the simple heuristic already running in the app. When it doesn't win, we say so — and ship the simple one.
EXP-04National forecasts
Where a 3-day forecast lands within a cent
Alongside the per-station model, an asymmetric error-correction model tracks each national average. On a 3-day horizon its mean error is under 1 cent per litre in Spain — and it calls the direction of the market correctly about 7 times out of 10.
| Market · horizon | Model error | Naive forecast | Direction hit rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spain · 3 days | 0.96 c/l | 1.04 c/l | 66 % |
| France · 3 days | 1.73 c/l | 1.88 c/l | 67 % |
| Italy · 14 days | 6.43 c/l | 7.58 c/l | 66 % |
This research ships in the GasBu app
Price trends from this work are already live in GasBu. Next up: a push notification that tells you to fill up today — before your station raises its price.