Fuel Economy

Hi Les
My wife has an 04 V6 Classic and I think the consumption is heavy.
She uses it in Sydney most days on the road for work appointments. She has full records of all fuel and has completed 17 000 km. I try to get her to record it so I can do the sums but I can't get through. She isn't bothered.
Once it gets down to a quarter of a tank you need to fill up pretty quickly because it won't last long.
Bear in mind they are 150kW and the gearing may be sucking the juice out of it.
If I can make sense of her records I will attempt to put some figures together.

That consumption is high for a hightech vehicle but you must remember that you are doing Stop/Start driving. So you are accellerating away from each stop and that is where you use the extra fuel. On a straight run without stopping you would probably achieve 10/100 instead of 15/100. I wonder if they make a Long Range tank for those vehicles?

Les & Clare - that size engine with such a small tank is just not suited to Australian conditions. Consider moving to a Turbo Diesel Prado. They hold 180 litres and use about 11l/100 in the conditions you describe. Your figures convert to 15.2 L/100 so you can see there's quite a difference. My experience withV6 petrol engines in 4wds leads me to feel your figures are quite typical. Petrol consumption is of course dependent on so many factors but the main one is the use of the "GO" pedal. You could drive your vehicle in a way that would use 17l/100 and you could also modify your driving to get down to say 13.5L/100 so I think your figures indicate an average style. Diesel doesn't give such a high variation and you would expect 12.5 in stop/start city driving and 11 on the highway. I hope this has been of some help!

Les,
I am very surprised that you only get 15L/100km. I would have picked a turbo diesel for this job myself - my 2003 Discovery would do the trip twice on a single tank of fuel. Never the less, I'd get the vehicle checked to see if there is a problem. Or maybe a bit less "zoom zoom".

Are you using premium unleaded ?? If not this may help a bit.
Do you have any excess junk that you are carrying around in the car?? Take it out.
Also inflate your tyres a bit more than normal, this will help too.
Does the car use mud&snow tyres?? Maybe on your next set go to straight road tyres.

HTH

John D

If you have the auto you may find an improvement in the stop start part of the driving if you lock out the overdrive until you are up to speed. As long as you are not hammering the throttle you may find a small improvemnt as the engine isn't working quite as hard.
works on some cars but not on others. experrryment?

support the other comment that premium fuel may assist also.
It may all come down to a trade off between getting the job done quickly (or in a reasonable time) versus backing off a bit to see if the consumption comes down.

good luck

A

stop start plus you have got an auto, so yeah 15/100 is probably spot on.

Ie manual v6 jacks get anywhere from 12-16 av. autos can be up to 20-22

Autos will always use more fuel by their very design, it takes power to run the box plus the losses through the torque converter etc.

You could try to find out the points at which the convertor goes into lock up mode (nearly all newer autos do this) and try to drive to suit. But i dont think you will make it.

Have you got it leased against the mail contract ?? might be easier to try and get rid of it, go the base model t/d prado with its massive range..