Hypermiling – is there any (legal) act in a car that can make you any more tense? The act of trying desperately to use as little fuel as possible while still making progress makes you a slave to that small readout in the middle of the dash. It’s slow but it’s still guaranteed to raise your heartrate and perhaps pull some sweat from your pores.
GRR Garage: Volkswagen Amarok – hypermiling a V6 pick‑up
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Well, that has been this week with our long-term Volkswagen Amarok. It was about time we saw just how many miles you could get out of our pick-up, and that task of course fell to me. Cue several days of lifting and coasting, trying to carry as much roll-ey momentum through the corners and squeezing the throttle as little as possible on exiting a junction.
It’s incredibly stressful work but ultimately quite satisfying. The Amarok is tall and heavy so maintaining momentum through the corners is not a simple task at times, which makes the act all the more interesting. Where can you gain that extra little bit of mileage, how far into that corner can you coast before you need to dab the brakes and turn? Then at the end of the week you get a little sense of satisfaction when you’ve hit a goal.
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OK, so with a 2.2-tonne pick-up powered by a massive 3.0-litre V6 diesel we were never going to suddenly find ourselves smashing out 75mpg, but we once managed to hit 39mpg on a journey home. Compared to our normal 33mpg, that felt like a pretty decent percentage return.
How did we do in the end? Well we were helped by a journey of several hundred miles up the country, but we managed a healthy 36.5mpg over seven days of trying. Which we think is pretty good.
MPG this week: 36.5
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