Mostly city driving? What kind of MPg you get?

If I had to guess I’d say a good 90% of my driving is stop and go city, only had the car a month and only have been able to do 1 MPG calculation on only a 9.5 gallon fill up and it yielded 31.8. it’s rated at 31/43 but I was wondering if any city drivers are doing any better than the 31.

I’m hoping to get a little better with a 13-14 gallon fill up, I read that the deeper you go into the tank the better average you get, is this right?

If your driving is 90% city....you bought the wrong car.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

What transmission? How many miles on your car? Do you use air conditioning?



You can look at fuelly for cars like yours:
http://www.fuelly.com/car/volkswagen/golf/2014?engineconfig_id=103&bodytype_id=2&submodel_id= (JSW is Golf Wagon in Canada). "Based on data from 15 vehicles, 933 fuel-ups and 405,676 miles of driving, the 2014 Volkswagen Golf gets a combined Avg MPG of 35.92 with a 0.32 MPG margin of error."


Average shouldn't change on a hand calculation based on gallons and miles driven if your driving style isn't changing.

2012 DSG with less than 16k on the odometer, using air maybe 50%

It might be the wrong car for me but I pulled the trigger because 1) the price, $9900 2) the mileage 3) the torque 4) last chance for a TDI 5) California gas prices now $3.79, future $5

Coming from a Passat TSI that I was getting 23/24 with the same driving, I’d be really happy to get mid 30’s

Totally admit that I’m a diesel newbie and did not know diesels excel on longer runs, buying the wrong car! is it gonna blow up and die because if my 90% city driving?

Mine was in the mid 29's on today's fill up. Generally around 31-33. On long road trips I can get up to 36, have never gotten better than that. To get 36, I need air off and 75 or less. It does 34ish at 80 and 32-33 at 80 with air on.

My lifetime so far is 31.4 mpg.

former520 said:

Mine was in the mid 29's on today's fill up. Generally around 31-33. On long road trips I can get up to 36, have never gotten better than that. To get 36, I need air off and 75 or less. It does 34ish at 80 and 32-33 at 80 with air on.

My lifetime so far is 31.4 mpg.

Click to expand...

I’m guessing your mostly stop and go city driving?

Longest run I’ve been on was a 120 mile round trip, on this current tank

CheapBastard said:

Totally admit that I’m a diesel newbie and did not know diesels excel on longer runs, buying the wrong car! is it gonna blow up and die because if my 90% city driving?

Click to expand...

it won’t blow up. Plenty of people use diesels in the city. It’s just not the best vehicle for the job. A hybrid is the way to go. I would seriously consider selling and buying something else.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

another alternative; once a week or every other week, get out of the city and take a longer, enjoyable drive, personally, I prefer a nice twisty country back road, thankfully that's most of my driving anyway, I dislike cities, too many people packed in like sardines, no room to truly breathe....

besides, when the inevitable Zombie Uprising happens (and we know it *will*) the cities will be a major pandemic petri dish...

besides, most hybrids I've had the misfortune of driving are utterly soulless and sterile, not a single particle of fun in them...

the Golf platform is just plain *FUN*

CheapBastard said:

Totally admit that I’m a diesel newbie and did not know diesels excel on longer runs, buying the wrong car! is it gonna blow up and die because if my 90% city driving?

Click to expand...

When I was in Europe all the taxicabs I encountered were diesel. Stop and go city driving. This forum has an attitude that a TDI must be driven on long highway drives. I myself don't buy it. Your car will serve you well in the city and not blow up or fall apart. You just won't see that high mpgs that many post.

I agree with MichaelB. The TDI will run fine around town and last longer than most other cars. But stop and go driving will bring your mileage down, just like in any IC vehicle. So will driving fast. So if high MPG is your goal, longer, constant speed drives, at or near the speed limit is your best bet. Other driving only hurts the mileage calcs, not the car.

In my limited experience driving the newer platforms, they definitely get much lower in town mileage than my A4 did. It would almost always return 50 in my mixed driving (never much higher than 70/30 hwy /city for me).

Same driving on my mkv 5m got me at best 44. On the jsw 6m ~ 40.

But these things are a lot heavier and sporting much more emissions gear.

I'm still hoping trip mileage will get into the mid or maybe even high 40s.

28-40 is what I was able to see city driving the 2010 I had, very similar to my 2006 TDI. I'd expect low 30s most of the time, the 40 mpg tank was from hypermiling.

My best tanks in the city came from accelerating hard to the speed limit and coasting to the stops. It took that from the hypermiling tips thread. The technique works, it's just not sustainable for myself.

http://forums.tdiclub.com/showthread.php?t=335035

I love alot about this little runabout. It does more IMO than any souless prius or the likes. There are some pretty stout one tank mpg claims are out there but the more we new JSW owners realize real world mpg... well... Its a decent trade off.

That said I have my 6m JSW as mostly around town and am "o.k." with 30's mpg. I have 50+ hyway with perfect flat land and no regens but that cant be expected around town. My biggest concern is the DPF and heat stress related turbo issues. That said I started with an inexpensive clean 69k, new DPF, brakes, tires and ever increasingly hard to find manual trans & wagon.

For someone like you and I, fuelly.com is really good. And BTW I found my 1st tank with 2 year fuel needed blown thru. I add 2oz of Marvel Mystery Oil every fill up and ran a biocide on the 1st tank (then changed fuel filter)

The sooner I can get out of Ca, the sooner the DPF gets shelved, just sayin'. I miss my 04 NON PDF TDI Passat that got the same mpg with much more room. But that is no longer reality and your JSW is a great car all things considered.

I get anywhere from 31-33 around town during the week and average around 36-37 mixed. Bone stock, no tune.

Thanks for the inputs, I have always driven hypermilling style and never knew there was a terminology for it, I drove an 18 wheeler for several years and it’s second nature to drive this style. I kinda gave it up with my TSI but with the TDI I find myself doing it , get a lot of pissed off people that like to stay on the throttle until a couple car lengths of the red light but I don’t care, I’m only caring about my MPG and wallet

In town (Dover and Somersworth NH) I get 30-32
on the back roads, 38-45, depending on hills/traffic
on the interstate (rte 16 and 95) I get 38-42, I was expecting higher, but that's at 65-70 MPH (Maine Turnpike speed limit is 70)

still light years better than my '07 Rabbit (32-34 if i'm lucky, closer to mid-high 20's, high teens in the winter) or my departed Honda Element (low-mid 20's)

My last three full city tanks were 35.4, 38.9, 38.4 according to fuelly. Range was 475-520 on those tanks iirc. Most of the roads on my commute are 35-55mph and I don't flog it the whole time. Also mine is tuned/deleted so maybe not the best comparison.

I also use a Frostheater anytime the temps go below 35°F so my winter mileage rarely suffers on my commute.

Sent from my SM-N960U using Tapatalk

I'm averaging between 460 - 500 miles per tank with mixed driving. Only 4 tanks through the car since purchasing it, though. I just downloaded Fuelly and entered in my most recent fill up (13.719 gallons) and am looking forward to seeing some solid mpg data moving forward.

My commute is just 8 miles one way, all surface streets, in the greater Boston area Monday - Friday. Weekends I'm almost always driving north on the highway. Sure, my use case isn't going to yield the high mpg numbers I see posted here but the JSW is WAY more fuel efficient than my previous car which was a Infiniti G37x. I was averaging 19 mpg with that pig over 5 years of ownership. 20 gal tank it it took premium gas. Can't say I miss it at all!

My commute is 70% highway and 30% city driving with stoplights. I'm averaging about 36-38 for that. Best I've gotten on a highway tank was 43.5 MPG. 2014 w/ 6MT

my regular usage is 70% hwy/30% city. Best tank (pre-fix) was 46.9 - 665 miles. Best tank (post-fix) was 44.7 - 585 miles. My Fuelly numbers in my sig are for every mile since the car was new.

MichaelB said:

When I was in Europe all the taxicabs I encountered were diesel. Stop and go city driving.

Click to expand...

Those taxi drivers are also flooring it everywhere

It's not the city driving that kills diesels, it's short drives where it doesn't get up to temp, and low load conditions that never allow carbon build up to clear out

I get 30-31 mpg with bike racks, so we're all in the same ballpark. Didn't change much since the fix.

I live and work in a very dense urban area of Atlanta (Buckhead). My 3-3.2 mile commute will hit either 14 stoplights or 9 stoplights depending on which route I take (typically take the 14 stoplight route cause it has less potential for accidents - the 9 light route is the closest thing to a demolition derby you can get without actual impact) and takes anywhere from 10-20 minutes depending on traffic on my way into work. Going home same number of lights but can take anywhere from 20-45 minutes (yes there are some days I could walk it faster).

Doing 100% city tank I will end at 20-24 MPG - I pretty much drive exclusively in Sport mode. Still much better than the 11-13 MPG I was getting my E350 4Matic, or the 9-11 MPG I was getting in my MB C300 running E85.

There is no way to get good economy on my commute no matter what cars I have driven. Even the '18 Toyota Camry 2.5 I had as a rental (rated at 28 city) only hit ~17 MPG city the week I had it.

03GolfTDI said:

I live and work in a very dense urban area of Atlanta (Buckhead). My 3-3.2 mile commute will hit either 14 stoplights or 9 stoplights depending on which route I take (typically take the 14 stoplight route cause it has less potential for accidents - the 9 light route is the closest thing to a demolition derby you can get without actual impact) and takes anywhere from 10-20 minutes depending on traffic on my way into work. Going home same number of lights but can take anywhere from 20-45 minutes (yes there are some days I could walk it faster).

Doing 100% city tank I will end at 20-24 MPG - I pretty much drive exclusively in Sport mode. Still much better than the 11-13 MPG I was getting my E350 4Matic, or the 9-11 MPG I was getting in my MB C300 running E85.

There is no way to get good economy on my commute no matter what cars I have driven. Even the '18 Toyota Camry 2.5 I had as a rental (rated at 28 city) only hit ~17 MPG city the week I had it.

Click to expand...

I’ve never seen a commute as brutal as that, 1/2 hour to go 3 miles, I’d be raging postal worker by the time I got home

Get a Chevy volt.

I know that the MPG reading in the dash computer tends to be a tad optimistic, but i'm wondering if it's better to reset the meter on every trip to get a more "accurate" reading of *that* trip, or reset it only when you refuel to get a ballpark estimate for that tank?

...actually, come to think of it, I can do both, use reading 1 for individual trip, and reading 2 for cumulative/overall

I just fueled up last night and on the secondary roads back home, it was getting 46.3 MPG, I go through town, and it drops to high 20's/low 30's

CheapBastard said:

Totally admit that I’m a diesel newbie and did not know diesels excel on longer runs, buying the wrong car! is it gonna blow up and die because if my 90% city driving?

Click to expand...

Nope. Will be fine. But all city driving on ANY car is not good for it.

I’m currently running my best tank of fuel so far, racked up 247 miles so far on less than 1/2 tank, still have almost an eighth before reaching the half mark.

Only thing different is it’s been on a 100 mile RT run and I threw some different fuel additive in.

CheapBastard said:

I’ve never seen a commute as brutal as that, 1/2 hour to go 3 miles, I’d be raging postal worker by the time I got home

Click to expand...

Trust me it truly is a nightmare.

On the bright side the days it has taken me 45-55 minutes (fortunately have not hit the hour mark just yet in 1.5 years), I just look in my rearview and at the tail lights in front of me and just relax because everyone around me is going through the same thing. I just settle back and listen to my music and call it a day.

It truly is worse in the morning when traffic is somewhat flowing but people just dawdle around. The lights are timed just right if you accelerate at a moderately decent pace to the speed limit you will hit all the greens, you get stuck behind 3 people driving around during the weekday rush hour grind like they are sight seeing you end up hitting like 8-10 red lights back to back. Worst is you hit the lights just as they turn red so you have to sit through the full light cycle - lather rinse repeat. If there is a lane opening at a red to get around I slide in so I can get past the dawdlers then surf through all the green lights because I know how to go.

It is maddening but eventually you just settle in and deal.