MPG?

Although this may not be the most exciting subject, we believe it's an important one.

When you're driving do you ever think about fuel economy? WAIT, don't close the page just yet. If you read on you might be surprised just how much difference a few mph can make.

As an example take the following journey of 200 miles down the motorway.

Doing 90Mph, pretty much all the way, you can expect to use almost 50% more fuel than if you did 70Mph. Surprised? So were we. Many people see this figure and think it's a load of C**p. Well why not put it to the test.

For one week drive as you would normally, if you have a MPG computer reset it to 0, it can also be a good idea to reset your mileometer as well.

When you get to 1/4 left in your tank, note down how many miles you did and the MPG if you have it. You could actually work out MPG by finding out how many gallons your tank holds and then dividing the number of miles by the gallons(3/4 of the tank capacity actually).

For the next week follow these rules:

1) Do not accelerate hard at any time unless it's a matter of life and death (no getting to McDonalds before it closes doesn't count).

2) Drive to the speed limit. We're well aware that many people ignore the speed limits, however just as a test, stick religiously to the limits this week.

3) Drive in as high a gear as possible. Most cars will tick along comfortably in 5th if you have it doing 40 Mph. If you need to accelerate drop down a gear or so until the car isn't straining but under no circumstances should you accelerate hard.

Conclusions

When we condcuted this test we found the following.

So what does this equate to? Well we found that it saved about 1/4 of a tank of petrol over the course of a week and that could be £8 a week = £8 x 52 Weeks = £416 / year. Thats a lot of money, even if you only drive like this half the time that's still £200.

So next time you're booting it along that dual carriageway, think about how much money you could be saving by slowing down to 70mph.

Date - 15/09/2006