What Car? True MPG web tool celebrates first birthday with over a million hits

What Car? True MPG turns a year old this month. Happy Birthday! It’s been a fantastic year for the web tool, as they have just reported that more than one million motorists have used it to check the fuel economy in the vehicle they currently own or one they are looking to buy. The free to use web tool, in association with Tesco Petrol Filling Stations, tests cars on real roads in the conditions that every motorist faces each day.

What Car? editor-in-chief Chas Hallett said: “We launched What Car? True MPG last April as a direct answer to the countless readers who had contacted us to say how disappointed they were with their car’s economy figure. Expecting high fuel economy and getting the opposite can double a household’s fuel expense. What Car? True MPG is a solution to this problem – the online tool gives Britain’s car buyers the most realistic fuel economy information possible – and it’s free to use.”

Interestingly, yet not surprising, the True MPG programme found discrepancies in official  figures and has revealed that 95.5% of cars do not match the economy figures produced in the laboratory-based government fuel economy tests. It also found that the largest disparity between government figures and True MPG figures are city cars and superminis, while SUV demonstrate the lowest disparity. It’s not all bad news, as they also found some models that actually exceed published data. See the best performing vehicles (per What Cars? recent press release) below:

Models that exceeded the official published government average mpg

1.	Mazda 3   2.3 MPS	+9.7%
2.	Nissan   370Z 3.7 V6	+6.8%
3.	Volvo   S60 3.0 T6 AWD 304 auto	+4.6%
4.	Volvo   XC90 2.4 D5 200 auto	+3.2%
5.	Ford   S-Max 2.0 TDCi 163 auto	+1.5%
6.	Peugeot   5008 2.0 HDi 150	+0.4%
7.	Volkswagen   California 2.0 TDI 140	0%
8.	Toyota   GT-86 2.0	0%
9.	Subaru   BRZ 2.0	0%