After more than 10,000 miles in our long-term Mazda CX-7 it’s probably about time I talked about fuel consumption.
Fuel spend is one of a fleet’s biggest costs and normally the subject of a BusinessCar long-term test report well before the five-digit mileage we’ve put on the Mazda in the past nine months.
However, I’ve discovered something about the Mazda that BusinessCar hasn’t seen before. With the CX-7, the consumption hardly changes from our 34.4mpg average. And for the record, the official combined fuel consumption figure is quoted as 37.7mpg.
No matter what the type of driving – stop-go city or super-eco motorway trips – I can’t get the mpg figure to shift by much more than 3mpg.
Interestingly, 3mpg is also the figure the trip computer seems to be over-reading by, but that’s fairly typical for any car when you calculate economy using the brim-to-brim method.
Recently I have been putting in some real effort into getting a higher mpg. Having covered a lot of motorway miles in the past month at quite sedate speeds (and without aircon) I’ve still only been achieving 35mpg or 36mpg.
But there is an up-side to the stubborn mpg. If I’m less careful about my eco driving habits the figure doesn’t drop by more than 3mpg either, which in a big 4×4 is a welcome bonus.
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