Just to finish this thread off - I've just got to the end of that tankful of diesel and have figures to report!
I'm in a lucky position in as much as I don't have to use the Rover to get to work, so I can pick and choose which journeys I use it for. As a result I've been able to avoid lots of short journeys and although conditions haven't been perfect for fuel consumption, I've managed to be fairly frugal. Most of the miles have been convered under fairly favourable conditions in terms of speed and braking, however I've also had to cover quite a bit of congested town driving and also a couple of motorway journeys, some of them with heavyish loads and at 70 MPH, so it's not all been plain sailing.
IMAG1113 by
Tourist, on Flickr
In the end I got 718.6 miles until the range dropped to 0 miles. When filling it up, I put 60.28 litres (13.26 gallons) of fuel into the tank. The dash MPG read 56.5, however, the actual calculated figure was 54.19 MPG. NB each time I filled the tank, I brimmed it so that fuel was visible in the top of the filler neck.
During this tankful I also compared my odometer reading to the sat nav over about 20 miles and it was bang on, + or - 0.1 miles. I can confirm that I'm using stock tyres (215 / 55 R16 on Union Alloys).
So what have we learned?
- 700+ miles from a single tankful is possible
- The float switch(es) in the tank aren't sticking
- The car's MPG readout is 5% too optimistic (or offset by about 2 MPG)
- My tourer's minimum 'best' MPG figure over 718.6 miles is just over 54 MPG
- It can definitely do better than that, given better driving conditions
- A saloon driven in the same way can probably also do better than my tourer without any trouble
- I'm going to enjoy putting my foot down a bit more over the next tankful!
Cheers all, and happy (economical) new year everyone :-)
Simon R.