Stretching your fuel dollars

Aug 14, 2008 8:39 AM

With gasoline hovering near $4 a gallon, many buyers are looking at more fuel-efficient vehicles. The good news is that you don't have to give up a lot of passenger or cargo room to find a versatile vehicle that can save you a lot of money at the pump.

The most sensible approach to getting good fuel economy is to consider vehicles that get the best gas mileage in their class. The savings between the best car in the class and the worst can be significant. For example, the hybrid Toyota Highlander, at 24 mpg, can save you about $1,700 a year in fuel over the conventional Dodge Durango V8 at 13 mpg if you drive a typical 12,000 miles in a year, and pay $4 a gallon for gas. And while that may be an extreme case, even a Nissan Altima 2.5S, which gets 25 mpg overall, will save you about $480 in fuel in a year over a 20 mpg Saturn Aura.

Another important factor to keep in mind is weight, which can vary a lot between cars and trucks of roughly the same size. Extra weight can really penalize you in stop and go driving, where the extra weight costs you money every time you start off from a stop-light. One way to put the weight penalty in context is to compare two vehicles with identical powertrains but different weight, and look at city mileage, where aerodynamics is not a factor. It happens that the Cadillac CTS and Saturn Outlook share the same V6 powertrain, but the Outlook weighs 1,075 pounds more. In city traffic the Outlook gets 10 mpg while the CTS gets 13, according to our tests. That’s a difference of 30 percent.

If you do a lot of stop and go driving, look at the spread between city and highway miles. For instance, the Subaru Legacy GT Limited turbo, which uses premium, gets 27 mpg on the highway but just 11 mpg in the city. But the Toyota Camry XLE V6 gets 16 mpg in the city and 32 on the highway. If city driving amounted to 10,000 miles per year, then the Camry would save you about $1,300 annually on city driving alone versus the Subaru.

STRATEGIES THAT WORK

It might pay to do a little soul-searching to determine how much car you really need:

Consider a small wagon or hatchback rather than an SUV. The Mazda5 minivan, for instance, carries the same 39 cubic feet of cargo as the V8 Jeep Commander, but for 12,000 miles on $4 gasoline, the Mazda would save nearly $1,600 annually.

Do you really need a full-sized pickup rather than a compact? Choosing a Honda Ridgeline or Nissan Frontier over a V8-powered Ford F-150 or Dodge Ram 1500 would save almost $500 a year.

Is four- or all-wheel drive a necessity? If not, then two-wheel-drive versions of the same vehicle will yield an extra 1 or 2 mpg.

Can you stand a manual transmission? Among the small cars we've tested, manual shift generally adds 2 mpg overall versus an automatic transmission. The manual-shift Scion xD we tested averaged 34 mpg overall. That’s the same as the larger but much pricier Toyota Camry Hybrid.

For a people mover, consider a minivan instead of an SUV. Large three-row SUVs, such as Chevrolet's Suburban, can carry seven passengers, but average only 14 mpg. Minivans such as the Toyota Sienna and Honda Odyssey can carry seven people in greater comfort and average 19 mpg. That's worth about $900 per year in fuel savings.

For more information on fuel economy and alternative fuels, see our Guide to driving green.

More About: Cars | All Cars News