It's a standard that all manufacturers use.

You can then compare one to another.

I doubt if anyone will ever achieve the same figures, but it's a guide to compare one to another.

Anyone remember the old economy runs in the '70s?

My previous car used to get very close to the official figures. I had an 899cc Fiat Seicento. On a long motorway run (at 70mph) I could always exceed the extra urban figure (55.3mpg) by a few mpg. With a mixture of driving I was getting around 44mpg IIRC which is about 2mpg less than the combined figure. If I used slightly different roads I would have probably matched the combined figure though. I think the lowest I ever got (with really bad stop-start traffic) was about 34-36mpg (official urban is 35.7mpg). On a normal day with stop-start traffic I would usually get at least 38-39mpg though.

My current car (Fiat Panda 100HP) isn't as good though. The Urban figure is about right. The combine figure is quite difficult to achieve though. It will usually miss it by 3-4mpg. I have had the extra-urban figure once, but that needed some very slow driving. Driving between 50mph and 60mph can push me up to the extra-urban figure, but 70mph kills the consumption completely. Driving at 50-60mph is rarely practical on motorways though. With my Seicento it would probably easily exceed 60mpg if I had driven it at 50-60mph.

I don't think the fuel consumption tests are good enough. They certainly aren't good enough for us to compare between cars. It also beomes even more difficult to compare cars when some of them have stop-start, and some are hybrids.

They are not achieveable because the conditions under which the test is conducted are not the conditions in which the car is driven. As someone else has said, the figures can be used to see which car has the better figures but they are unlikely to achieveable out on the road in the real world.

Duplicate post deleted

Edited by Armitage Shanks {p} on 23/10/2010 at 11:50

I own a Ford Ka and the combined value is 42 mpg. I easily get 45mpg when driving to and from work, and general driving. When I lived in Luton, I barely scraped 40 mpg due to the horrendous traffic, traffic lights etc. I think a large part of the real world mpg is how you drive. If you tail gate, continually brake and accelerate, or do high speeds on the motorway, you'll get poor mpg. If you drive smoothly, and traffic is not awful, you'll do well.

I do feel on one hand that fuel consumption figures are usually difficult to achieve as the fact is the test by which these are published are not the same conditions in which the car will be driven, which is why i tend to look out for professional or owners reviews of a car, someone who drives it regularly, to tell us what it really does. But mpg can vary so much with driving style and the sort of roads you're on, speed, tyre pressure etc that its difficult to say to manufacturers that they have to publish an "accurate" figure.