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 2008 Mazda6 Sport and 2008 Honda CR-V
2008 Mazda6 Sport 2008 Honda CR-V A question we also wanted to answer was, given the right conditions and driving style, can you meet Canada's Energuide fuel consumption ratings that are prominently displayed on the vehicle in the showroom? How realistic are they?
After two months behind the wheel of a Jeep Grand Cherokee Diesel and a Toyota Camry Hybrid, for example, we concluded that you can affect your fuel consumption by modifying your driving style. But we also discovered that a long list of conditions that the driver cannot control conspired to increase fuel consumption. Then again, as Grant Yoxon pointed out in an earlier article in this series: "The Toyota Camry Hybrid is capable of meeting and even exceeding its Energuide rating, but only when conditions are ideal… and in winter, conditions are usually anything but ideal. However, over the two months I drove the car, I became convinced that the fuel efficient driving techniques we employed - smooth driving, driving close to the speed limit, a light foot on the accelerator, pacing to avoid red lights, planning to reduce the frequency of stop signs and preparing early to stop when a stop light or stop sign is unavoidable - kept the fuel consumption from being worse than it was. So a fuel efficient driving style will save you money, even in poor conditions."
With this in mind, we've begun "real world" testing our second pair of test vehicles: a 2008 Mazda6 (midsize sedan) and a 2008 Honda CR-V (compact SUV). Initial reports follow:
2008 Mazda6 Sport
After enduring three months of Ottawa's snowy winter weather, you'd think we would be seeing some signs of spring. But no, close to the North Pole where we live, winter is one of those stupid battery bunnies that keeps going and going. Fortunately the standard 17-inch wheels of our $26,395 Mazda6 Sport are fitted with Pirelli Snowsport winter tires, and the car has a decent traction control system that helps it get underway on slippery surfaces. The four-wheel disc brakes with antilock are also effective, and the heater is a good one (no heated seats, though, which I miss).
According to the Energuide program, this car should consume 10.1/6.9 L/100km, city/highway, when equipped with the 2.3-litre four-cylinder engine matched to a five-speed manual transmission. This generates a combined city/highway Energuide rating of 8.7 L/100 km (about 33 miles per imperial gallon), which is very good for a midsize car, even a four-cylinder one with a manual transmission. The figure of 8.7 L/100 km, therefore, is what I'll be aiming for using a fuel efficient driving style.
However, while it's hard to push fuel inefficient driving in this weather, I ran through the first tank (the Mazda6 has a 68-litre tank, a useful size for long-distance driving) as impatiently as safety would allow. That included jack-rabbit starts, unnecessary idling, and unnecessary weight, with an overall uneven driving style that was heavy on the gas pedal. This is our usual arsenal of fuel-inefficient driving habits that we have found will negatively impact your fuel economy.
Baseline results from the Mazda6 generate a combined rating of 10.2 L/100km (27.7 mpg), which is 17 per cent more than the Energuide estimate. Check in next week for an update. Hopefully practising a fuel-efficient driving style will return better numbers.
2008 Honda CR-V EX-L w/navi
This has been a winter to remember in eastern Ontario. If it's not snowing, it's cold, very cold. And when it snows, it snows and snows and snows. The banks on either side of my driveway are taller than I. We don't know where to put the snow anymore and the driveway is getting narrower with each snowfall.
As luck would have it, the week we baselined the CR-V was a pretty good week - with more cold than snow. But you can't wait for an awful week to fix the baseline. The week following the first fill-up is the week that goes on the record.
We drove the car normally, not excessively, but without paying attention to the good driving habits that reduce fuel consumption. We let it idle a lot, to warm up the interior before leaving and to keep it warm while waiting for a passenger. The result: 12.97 L/100 km in a 70/30 mix of city and highway driving. The Energuide rating on the CR-V is 10.7 L/100 km in the city and 7.8 L/100 km on the highway. So we exceeded the Energuide rating, which is determined in ideal conditions, by a good 30 per cent.
On our next two tanks of fuel we tried to reduce fuel consumption by eliminating idle time as much as possible, accelerating gently and sticking to posted speed limits. We also planned routes in advance to avoid or reduce traffic lights and stop signs, because unnecessary acceleration is the enemy of fuel efficient driving.
With the weather getting worse (no longer was it either cold and snowing - now it was cold AND snowing), we proved that fuel efficient driving techniques can reduce fuel consumption even in the face of the worst winter in decades, at least marginally. Tank number two came in at 12.2 L/100 km while tank number three cut that a bit at 12.08 L/100 km.
We'll see if we can trim it some more in the next three weeks and hopefully we'll get some help from the weather as March approaches. But it's going to take a miracle of the weather gods to get the CR-V anywhere near its Energuide fuel consumption rating.
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