Cbouts

Good morning!

Just recently (11/19) picked up a 2010 A4 6 speed Manual. I love the car! 58K miles and everything feels tight and solid. no rattles/squeaks/vibrations.

My only concern is that the MPG seems very low. I filled the tank and my range indicator said 375 miles. Then I drove approx. 70 miles with about 75% being highway and town roads (I wouldn't really count it as city driving). The car is indicating that I used a quarter of a tank in that drive. For a car with a HW rating of 30MPG, that's a little concerning. with a 17 Gallon tank I would have used more then 4 gallons on that trip which would equal APROX 16.5MPG

Also, Went for a drive last night totaling 20 miles and my range indicator went from 300 to 260... ummmm 40 mile drop??.

Some additional notes:
Conservative driving - 70 on HW
Recently serviced at 55K miles
Is does say "Service Due" but no check engine
Will be replacing Plugs with Denso Iridium's in the next few days, might help?

Is this normal? any help would certainly be appreciated.

Thanks!
-Bouts

Kris Hansen

It all depends on how you drive. You have to drive quite conservatively to get great mileage with the 2.0T. Think short shifting, barely cracking the pedal, etc. If you're riding the boost, revving it up, you'll lose a lot of MPGs.. Anything over 75 you'll also take a big hit.

irenesbob

You cannot figure out how economical your car is based on these short trips and the subsequent readouts you get. The sensor in the fuel tank could be faulty/stuck and various technical gremlins can conspire to give bogus readings. Also human error can creep in; did you fill the tank to the same level each time?
I recommend: fill the tank, drive until the gauge is below 1/4, fill it again and then calculate the mpg. Even this way, you need several fill-ups (always filling the tank to the same point) to get any real sense of what your mpg's are. You should keep a running accounting so that over thousands of miles you can accurately see what the car is doing in terms of fuel consumption. I have had Excel spreadsheets where I enter every drop of gas put in all my cars since about 2002; it calculates the most recent tankful’s distance and mpg, as well as overall since the first fill-up. My current A6 2.0 averages 24.3 mpg overall for 18,000 miles, but I have recorded tank fill-ups from 16 mpg to 36 mpg. A single (or a very few) data points don’t really mean anything.

Cbouts

I completely agree, these just seemed like such an extreme that it might be something defective. I will be doing a long drive over Thanksgiving and plan to keep track of miles and fueling to get a (slightly) more accurate estimate of MPG.

Thank you for the info, I definitely appreciate it!

irenesbob

FWIW:
I have leased 4 Audi’s since 2005 (2 A4’s and 2 A6’s). Every one of them has had the same “not so sweet” spot on the gas gauge between ½ and ¾ where it drops really quickly from ¾ to half and then stays kind of constant for much longer before dropping to ¼. The progression of the needle from full to empty is not at all linear -it can take almost 100 miles to drop from full to ¾, but then it drops to 1/2 in 30 or so miles – annoying, but overall not a deal breaker. I live with it and now know to disregard the portion of the gauge from ¾ down to ½.

Fox Fader

My car is doing acceptable here in west central Georgia on 93 octane. Upon fill up my indicator showed 420 miles, which I knew was off base, but I'm down to almost a 1/4 of a tank now and things look good. Im showing 274 miles on the tank with a 45 DTE. I'll post up my mpg when I fill up.