INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Filling up the car’s tank could be getting a little bit easier on the wallet.

At a Shell gas station on the Old South Side, the price of a regular gallon of gas on Wednesday afternoon was $2.85 a gallon.

AAA finds the average price for a gallon of regular unleaded gas in Indiana is $3.05 a gallon. That’s 31 cents cheaper than a year ago, but don’t expect those prices to stay for the holidays.

“It’ll probably pick up around Thanksgiving and Christmas as people go to out-of-town trips,” said Kyle J. Anderson, a professor and economist at Indiana University Kelley School of Business. “Those extra demand lead to higher prices. A lot of this is outside our control. It’s outside the control of the U.S. There’s a lot of different things that go into the price of gas and oil. It may go up; it may go down. Gas prices are really hard to predict.”

Anderson says gas prices have been slowly declining for years. He says the increase of oil production after the COVID pandemic helped. “We’ve seen gas and energy prices come down steadily over the last 2-3 years. There were some peak inflation in 2022.”

The economist stressed that so many pricing factors are beyond the U.S. control. “Oil prices exist on the global market, so the production in the Middle East, conflict in Eastern Europe, all these things factor in.”

Anderson thinks Donald Trump’s election win didn’t impact the latest gas prices at all. He says Trump’s policies have yet to be enacted. “We may see in a Trump administration, with more energy-friendly policies, more production that could lead to lower prices in the future. I don’t think it’s playing out right now.”

The dip in gas prices from summer to fall can also be due in part to the gas blends. AAA said the summer gasoline blend is more complex and costly than than the winter blend. The summer blend also contains butane, which is more expensive. Drivers can expect to pay a few cents less during the cold season than the summer.

“One thing were seeing is gas prices tend to fall this time of year because people drive a lot less in the late fall and winter than they do in summer months,” Anderson said.

Check local gas prices at WISHTV.com, supported by GasBuddy.