Earlier this week, I pulled my 24-year-old SUV into a Sacramento gas station for its weekly — more or less— fill-up. It was 14.5 gallons at $4.05, plus the ever-mysterious 9/10 of a cent, per gallon.

I could have gone to a nearby Chevron station, but it wanted $4.59 a gallon and would have cost me about 8 bucks more.

While California’s gas prices are among the nation’s highest, thanks largely to the state’s hefty taxes and regulatory costs, they vary widely from station to station, even among those under the same ownership.

This variance complicates the obsession that California’s motorists and politicians have with gas prices.

California’s nearly 30 million cars and light trucks travel 340 billion miles each year and burn more than 13 billion gallons of gas, costing $60.7 billion in 2

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