My 1.6 diesel elegance has covered 8000 miles and I have noticed the mpg is improving,

Just been on a trip to Portsmouth drove down on the hottest day of the year bags of air-con return journey cool day no air-con.

525 miles round trip including 15 miles round town driving full tank to full tank 7.6 gallons = 69 mpg in sports mode, quite happy

Glad to hear that as I've just picked up my 16MY Octavia VRS TDi less than 48 hours ago and was concerned that the 'Range' was only saying 370 miles with a full tank of diesel. My previous two cars reported over 550 mile ranges with a full tank of fuel.

It's nice to know that the cars internal computer completely disagrees with the truely farcical official economy figures.  When I refuel it says 450 mile range (which works out at just shy of 41mpg).  The combined figure is 64.2mpg so the computer 'should' always reset to 700 but it doesn't..... and it's not because it learns what economy it performs at and takes that into account, the first ever fill up at 1 day old came up with the same 450 mile range.

The range after fill-up always seems fairly arbitrary on our MkII Octy, it often says something like 480, then steadily increases over the next couple of days, assuming we have only done local driving. Can be as high as 600+ on occasions.

My experience with diesels in the past has been the mpg improves gradually as you run in the engine, usually i always found by 20k miles it seems to settle so it takes a while.

 

Regard to the Range monitor, i believe its based on the last 30-60 minutes of driving, it has no link from i can see to the current Average MPG.

 

My favorite game is to fill up the car, and then see how far i can drive before the range actually lowers.

Best i think i had was covered 100 miles and a range of 480 miles left, not bad for tsi vrs

My 1.6 diesel elegance has covered 8000 miles and I have noticed the mpg is improving,

Just been on a trip to Portsmouth drove down on the hottest day of the year bags of air-con return journey cool day no air-con.

525 miles round trip including 15 miles round town driving full tank to full tank 7.6 gallons = 69 mpg in sports mode, quite happy

I do not subscribe to the 'mpg improves as the car runs in' theory as I have never experienced it with any of the 8 from new cars I have I owned.

Sure there are a huge number of factors that can influence consumption but when I have eliminated as many of those factors as possible then running a well maintained vehicle at a given speed, temp, flat road, zero wind conditions then I have not recorded any improvement over 90k km ownership of a vehicle.

In fact there is more chance it is worse due to development of less than perfect environment in the cylinders for burning fuel eg carbon build up.

You will always get certain days when consumption improves dramatically due to beneficial factors such as high temperatures, following winds, restricted speeds and good flowing traffic. The converse is true as well.

The biggest variable is the driver of course and their intent and ability to drive economically.

While your consumption was very impressive you have missed off a lot of factors such as average speeds or whether one day's factors resulted in better consumption.

Do the same journey in winter and I guarantee consumption will be worse. Do the same journey in 30,000 miles time and I'll be surprised if you better it.

I agree I didn't use average speed or driving conditions, the journey to Portsmouth took over well over 5hrs 30min in medium to heavy traffic at very high temperatures my return journey was 4 hrs 30min including a comfort stop in light to medium traffic in cool an patchy rain, I have made the same journey last year when the the car was new in very similar conditions perhaps not as hot and only achieved 60mph, I was a professional driver for all my working life I'm an IAM and ROSPA advanced driver perhaps this helps,

If you want to see the video of my journey all 10hrs in HD via mi-witness front and rear cameras it is available its a riveting watch(I think not)

All I was saying that I really really really like my Skoda's fuel consumption

A significant amount of the "MPG improves with miles" comes from getting used to the car in my opinion.

Even if you stay with a manufacturer usually the engine for new models is different (1.6 from 90ps to 105ps), different torque/power curves, gearing & pedal mapping.

 

It can take a while to get used to how to attenuate the pedal to match your normal driving style.

 

I did a driving day once where they fitted a car with dataloggers.

They asked everyone beforehand to rate the type of driver they were.

One guy had an original mk2 escort as his daily drive & he said he was a "slow, careful" driver.

His time around a pre-defined course in his car also agreed with this.

He then drove a Focus ST round the same course & he was one of the most agressive on the accelerator pedal of the group.

 

This was because in his escort, you had to use the pedal quite a lot & the engine anyway wasn't very powerful.

The ST on the other hand had a very agressive pedal map (100% throttle from 60% of pedal travel) & lots more torque so you have to be much more sensitive with the accelerator.

My Mk7 GTD seems to average between 50 and 52mpg most of the time, which given the performance on tap isnt bad at all really.

My Octavia 150 does a little more and can get near 60 mpg now on a really good gentle run.

Both cars have in excess of 20k miles on the clock though so that probably has something to do with it.

I am sure the range figure gets calculated roughly upon mileage covered on last tank + estimated range left. On the Golf I normally get about 400 miles done before I really need to think about fill up....usually 50-60 miles left and the estimated range upon fill up is nearly always 450 miles.

"Scouse Dave" I think you got great consumption and your additional info confirms how it was achieved. Having experienced British roads last week I don't think a hypermiling idiot would survive for long there anyway.

I agree with "Gabbo" about the time it may take to get used to different cars characteristics.

I transferred from a Mk2 diesel to a Mk3 1.4tsi (both manual) and the latter requires much more road anticipation and different engine use techniques to achieve relatively good consumption.

The Ford Focus 1 litre ecotec manual I drove in the UK was different again and I do not think I got near its potential economy.

I found the Focus accelerator and engine response a bit "doughy" even for a smaller engine, but it made me appreciate how good and responsive the Octavia 1.4tsi is.