Fuel Consumption

In December I pulled into a Shell Ultracity and they handed me a very handy logbook, which I've started to use. It has always been a habit of mine to calculate the consumption at the pump just after filling up, but usually I would just go "mmmmh, a bit lower than usual" or something like that and forget about it.

The interesting bits I gathered from writing it down is that aircon seems to be the biggest drain on fuel. On the 20km commute to work, I normally get arround 12 to 13 km per liter, doing arround 100km/h on the R44. During those extremely hot days in January, this dropped to about 11.3 km/liter. On a cooler day (using the econo setting on the airconditioner), doing 130 km/h on longer distances, I'd get as much as 13.7km per liter.

The best figure I got was on an early morning trip from Windhoek to Mariental (it was quite cold that morning), almost 16km per liter. Second best was a trip from Namibia to Pretoria via Botswana (arround 1100 km) which averaged 15km per liter (mostly because it was a cool day and Botswana has very strict speed enforcement).

It would seem that the biggest factors in fuel consumption is in order 1) Air Conditioner, 2) speed and 3) weight on board.