Zafira diesel / oil consumption

My diesel Mondeo averages 40mpg. This even includes short trips without even going into top gear (down a track) with no motorway driving, and motorway driving but at considerable speed. I put the lowish motorway mpg down to speed, so when you say you do long motorway stints, what speed do you do?

Rob Graham

People carriers are not particularly aerodynamic, so high speed motorway driving will be particularly bad for economy.

53 Mpg is a very ambitous figure for a people carrier, maybe you should try constant 55mph on the motorway and see if your econmy improves...

-- James

1700 miles is no where run in- modern engines, especially diesels are very tight when new. When you have around 6-7000 miles on the clock consider it run in. Mpg should be improving gradually with miles, but with the aerodynamics of a barn door, a people carrier is never going to be as good as its saloon car brother on fuel. I would expect middle 40's though driven at the speed limit.

Keep the factory oil in it until 10,000 miles, then if you wish change it at

5000 mile intervals after. Keep driving it fairly hard til these miles and you should have no oil burning problems in later life. :)

Tim..

I have had my '52 plate Astra 2.0DTi since July. When I bought it, it had

4500 miles on the clock, and it now has 7500. In that time, the oil has dropped about 3mm from the maximum mark. Fuel consumption around town works out at around 38mpg. On a long motorway run, I have seen figures of 55mpg. As other posters have said, 1700miles is still within the 'running-in' mileage for a modern diesel. Give it another few thousand miles and you should see the figures come down some more. I think my car used to be a company vehicle for its first few months, so I assume it was driven quite hard from new, as it has loosened up nicely. This would account for the low oil consumption.

HTH

Anthony Remove eight from email to reply.

My petrol passat 2L is the first i've had with a instantaneous MPG readout, so i watched it like a hawk for the first week or two. It averages 26 in town, 40 when bimbling along a A road at 60 or so and

37 when cruising down a motorway at 80-90. Anything above those speeds and its starts drinking like its going out of fashion.

I suspect it could do better if it had a 6th gear,but i don't know if it would have enough power to counter the wind resistance which of course gets higher (exponentially or logarithmically?) the faster you travel.

Totally irrelevant to the thread of course, just rather impressed that it's coming close to diesel-level economy.

You said that 'the manual says I should be around 35 for urban and 53 for motor way'. This is definitely not the case.

The official figures show that a specially prepared car driving in excellent conditions with virtually no load in achieved that result!

Read the small print at the bottom.

These can only be used to make comparisons with other cars.

Changing the subject, I agree with other posters. Firstly, you are no way near run in yet and secondly, you will not get decent economy driving hard at high motorway speeds.

If you want good economy go easy on it and cruise at 70-75.

Easier said than done, James. I own a five year old Rover 115 Diesel and last year, I drove from the West Midland to London at about 55 MPH. The fuel economy was unbelievable, however, the boredom factor proved almost terminal :-(

Needless to say, I drove back at the national speed limit and thought to myself, sod the economy!

Regards tox

All

Thanks for your replies.

For the record, my motorway driving is around 70 to 80mph.

I'll keep on recording the fule consumption though and see how I get on.

Cheers

Lou

Out 1.8 rarely cracks 30, maybe 32 on long runs (but I do drive hard). Our

1.6 used to average 35-40mpg on motorway. So it sounds like you're doing ok, it's faster than the 1.6 and sounds more economical (both are 25-29 in town) and Vauxhalls figures are impossible.

Errr, no, it's not, it's 20 - 25% less than a Passat TDI . . .