tikal
Veteran Member
Originally Posted by Fix_Until_Broke View Post
Girlfriend has a 1.8 TSI Passat and we regularly see 38-40 MPG on a 500 mile round trip with 250 miles at 75-80 and 250 miles at 60. She drives the same car back/forth to school/work and gets mid 20's in the cold winter and right about 30 in the spring/summer/fall. She does not know how to drive for economy. A couple co workers have 1.4 TSI Jetta's one has a ~100 mile highway commute and gets very high 40's and the other has a ~40 mile city commute and he gets mid 30's [edit = mid 40's /edit].
I'd have to agree as stated above that the performance and MPG gap between gas and diesel has more or less closed. Weather the complexity of gasoline direct injection will become a problem - we'll have to see. But I have confidence that a community like this will come up with solutions for them.
It is great to share these data points above regarding fuel economy of the latest small gasoline engines from VW ('small' by American standards).Edited above for accuracy after I asked him again today...
Having said that, once you start digging a little bit more under the surface and you look at relatively recent time (10 years or younger) MPG accumulated data from places like Fuelly, fueleconomy.gov and others (including some in Europe of course) you inevitably come to the conclusion that there is no such trend of closing the gap of fuel economy in same size vehicles. In fact the gap most likely widens in favor of light duty diesel as the size of the vehicle increases.
I would say that these long term real life MPG averages derived from millions of miles of compact, mid-size, etc. gasoline and light duty diesel cars are the most meaningful metric when it comes to comparing gasoline vs light duty diesel engines of relatively similar size.
Does this make sense?