Fuel consumption

[kiakid2]

My consumption seem good so far as I have only 5500 miles on the clock

[MikeTB]

I spend quite a bit of time on motorways and I generally set the cruise control to 72 which gives a true 70 on the sat nav. Sometimes I'll set it at 70, giving a true 68. At those speeds, over long distances, I've achieved 46-48 MPG on several occasions. However, push it even slightly above that and the fuel consumption sky-rockets. It's almost as if it's programmed to use excessive fuel to penalise you for breaking the speed limit? I know aerodynamics accounts for a lot of this, but the change is too abrupt for that to be the whole cause.

Alan

I am beginning to think there are differences between individual vehicles. On a motorway at about 70 mph I have rarely seen 40 mpg on a level road. Even a slight incline could cause consumption to drop below 30.
Now I am in the Isle of Man with lots of hills and no general speed limit I just logged 31 mpg on my last tank full. Last summer on the same roads I got my only tankful at over 40 mpg.
Due for a service so maybe that will change things.

[xtrailman]

A member on the CT forum weight his car at 1720kg on a weigh bridge, same model as mine, with a witter towbar same as mine (21kg), but I believe without a spare.

Brochure weight for that year is 1663kg which includes driver at 75kg, so that a lot of weight to be dragged up hill, high speed and hills kill fuel returns, as does having a DPF fitted.

With my typical journey, I believe the DPF is killing my average MPG, according to what I've read on the whirlpool Mazda CX-5 forum the CX-5 does a timed regen around every 250 miles.

IMO if you don't tow the petrol version might make more sense, I have towed with a petrol turbo with no problem, but the mazda on offer doesn't have enough torque for me, not even the 2.5 if it was offered in the UK.

If BMW offered the high powered petrol turbo that Europe gets in the new X1, then I probably would have bought that car.

[Deeps]

A member on the CT forum weight his car at 1720kg on a weigh bridge, same model as mine, with a witter towbar same as mine (21kg), but I believe without a spare........

.........according to what I've read on the whirlpool Mazda CX-5 forum the CX-5 does a timed regen around every 250 miles.

I took my CX-5 along to a public weighbridge on the same day that I collected it carrying onboard only the stuff that I would generally carry from day to day i.e. warning triangle, first aid kit, Garmin Satnav and a few other bits and bobs, but with the addition of the Mazda OEM towbar/ball. The car weighed in at 1760kg with, according to the towbar handbook, the towbar/ball comprising 22kg of that total. No spare wheel carried.

I'm still running her in with 940km on the clock but have only had one very smelly regen during that time which happened at approx the 500km mark.

[xtrailman]

Yes the car has got progressively heavier, with each upgrade from the original release.

Interesting that you have seen a regen at 500, they was a mention of Mazda updating the map to longer timed regens, hopefully they have done that.

But I expect to see under 40mpg with the auto with my usage.
Brochure weight for my model is 1703kg.

[ROCKETRON]

I am still seeing better fuel consumption since my 2 year service and software upgrade. My last tank averaged 47.0 in mixed motoring some fairly gentle due to speed restrictions and some heavy traffic around Coventry when i attended the NEC classic car show. I have also noticed that there aren't so many regens being done. I have had no regen in the last 360 miles, whereas they used to be every 200-250 miles. Before the last upgrade i would have found it very difficult to get to 47mpg over a reasonable length of time.

[xtrailman]

Nice to see some old "faces" from the mazda247 site, which has gone very quiet. 

I did initially see around 46mpg after last service (2nd), but it soon reverted back to low 40's. 

[renstar]

Hi, I've just joined this forum having been searching the net for some information and this thread came up.  I took delivery of my face-lift 2015 model CX-5 in October and have been really struggling with the low fuel economy since getting it.  Mine is the 2.2D 150 Sports Nav model.  So far I've put just over a 1K on the clock.

Since getting it, have done 3 or 4 long(ish) drives, from MK to London and MK to St Albans and back and the highest reading I got for any of them was 40mpg.  Driving around town in MK (school run and work about 15 miles per day roughly) I'd been averaging around 35-37mpg.  What really shocked me though was on Monday when I'm guessing due to the cold weather, the mpg just seemed to have tanked!  On work run this morning and yesterday, my average was 31mpg!   

Have to say, I'm really disappointed with the fuel economy - I knew I'd never get anywhere near the 'official' quoted but didn't expect to be be this far out either.  I really don't drive like a maniac either, promise!  Most I do is 60 on MK's A-roads but we do have a ton of roundabouts. My old car was B-class B150 petrol and whilst very under powered, I used to average about 42mpg around town so I was hoping for better with the CX-5 and my driving style hasn't changed. 

It's been mentioned to me that as the car is new, it needs time to loosen up a bit but how long is this likely to take?  Frankly, I can't afford the amount of money I'm spending on diesel.   A full tank barley lasts me 2 weeks!  What am I doing wrong??  Is there something wrong with the car or is this normal?

[Deeps]

Are you taking your fuel consumption figures directly from the OBC readout or from seeing how much fuel you need to put back in at the pump to fill up. The latter method is far more accurate as the OBC's readout in most cars really is notoriously inaccurate.

I'm just a little over the running-in mileage now and whilst I haven't been driving with foot to the floor knowing that most modern engines are run-in on the bench anyway, I haven't been holding up other traffic either if you get my drift. My average after two fill-ups is 40mpg, the last was 37.8mpg and the best 43.9mpg. Mileage has been accumulated with approx 500 km's on the motorway (max 120kmh) whilst the rest has been on a mixture of 'A' and 'B' roads but with negligible town driving. I should point out that my CX-5 has an auto box so gear changes are in the lap of the gods really. All in all, at this point I'm neither disappointed or pleased to be honest and with diesel being priced well under petrol over here in Germany it's not something that I'm going to lose sleep over although I do sympathise with your views.

[xtrailman]

My 2013 manual car returned about 41mpg after the first service (on the read out), down from the first year which was at around 43mpg.

New auto car with 100 miles is only at 37mpg. I expect it will improve, but it will only be by 1 or 2 mpg once its run in.
Problem is running in can take from 10K to 20K from my own experience.

The OP was probably having a DPF burn to drop the average down to 30mpg.

Last Xtrail I had took 20K miles to run in and the 173ps engine (manual) returned around 39-40mpg, but only had 266 pound feet of torque, nothing like the low down pull the CX-5 has.

[BigAl]

Hi, I've just joined this forum having been searching the net for some information and this thread came up.  I took delivery of my face-lift 2015 model CX-5 in October and have been really struggling with the low fuel economy since getting it.  Mine is the 2.2D 150 Sports Nav model.  So far I've put just over a 1K on the clock.

Since getting it, have done 3 or 4 long(ish) drives, from MK to London and MK to St Albans and back and the highest reading I got for any of them was 40mpg.  Driving around town in MK (school run and work about 15 miles per day roughly) I'd been averaging around 35-37mpg.  What really shocked me though was on Monday when I'm guessing due to the cold weather, the mpg just seemed to have tanked!  On work run this morning and yesterday, my average was 31mpg!   

Have to say, I'm really disappointed with the fuel economy - I knew I'd never get anywhere near the 'official' quoted but didn't expect to be be this far out either.  I really don't drive like a maniac either, promise!  Most I do is 60 on MK's A-roads but we do have a ton of roundabouts. My old car was B-class B150 petrol and whilst very under powered, I used to average about 42mpg around town so I was hoping for better with the CX-5 and my driving style hasn't changed. 

It's been mentioned to me that as the car is new, it needs time to loosen up a bit but how long is this likely to take?  Frankly, I can't afford the amount of money I'm spending on diesel.   A full tank barley lasts me 2 weeks!  What am I doing wrong??  Is there something wrong with the car or is this normal?

Agree with Deeps, the trip computer is - in my experience - consistently 2-3MPG optimistic compared with real world. Not sure if you've read this entire thread but MPG has alway been a bone of contention, borne out by the accumulation of real world figures on HJ's website http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/realmpg/mazda/cx-5-2012 I tackled Mazda UK directly about this discrepancy early on but got nowhere, unfortunately. For what it's worth, my first CX5 (2.2D 175 sport) averaged 41.3MPG over 60k miles, but my new one is currently averaging 44.5MPG over 6K miles (same model), so the new models must have something different in their mapping, IMHO. It appears that adding a bolt-on remapping box improves things as well (see elsewhere on the forum), depending on your attitude to modding the car from standard spec.

You mentioned that your old car was a petrol and felt underpowered? And you now have a diesel, but haven't changed your driving style. That could be contributing to the problem as the diesel has all the torque much lower in the rev range, so there's no need to rev it as much as a petrol. Use the torque, change up ASAP, adapt your technique a bit. See if that helps. My experience has also been that using Shell V+ diesel helps, the increased MPG offsets the extra cost and extends the range per tank considerably.

Alan

[renstar]

I'm doing both in terms of fuel consumption reading albeit roughly; never actually sat down and worked it out precisely but have always worked on the assumption that reading the car gives will be a little lower than reality.  Which makes the sort of figures I'm getting even more worrying.    I'm told on fill up that the car will do 420 miles, I drive it around a couple of days and suddenly it drops to the low 300s.  It just doesn't feel right - I was used to getting near enough a full month of driving on my B-class (provided I drove around MK only) so 2 weeks on full tank in the CX-5 is alarming!  Having said that, it costs me less to fill tank on my CX-5 than it did with my b-class, despite price of diesel being generally higher than petrol and the B-class supposedly having a smaller tank to the CX-5.  it doesn't make any sense to me. 

Incidentally, when will the  car be considered to have been fully 'run in'?  As mentioned in my OP, I've put just over 1K miles on the clock since taking delivery on 8 October. I know I get better fuel economy on longer drives and I'm suspecting one of the contributing factors might be that I'm not doing a long enough run on my morning commute but it seems perverse to have to drive the car more in order to get better fuel economy, no?

[BigAl]

Mazda originally told me that they didn't consider a CX5 fully run until until it had done 12.5k miles and had its first service.

As soon as you mentioned MK, I can sympathise; my son lives there. Each car he's had get significantly lower MPG around MK than it does anywhere else. He has a Scirocco R at the moment and gets about 23MPG normally, but mid to high 30's elsewhere (and had similar disparity with other petrol and diesel cars). He reckons is down to the combination of roundabouts and fast A roads, particularly having to pull out of side roads straight onto fast dual carriageways.

The remaining mileage figure does vary in how it drops - if you compare it as it falls with the trip meter as it rises, you'll find they don't "match". I'm pretty sure that you'll find it improving with mileage. I've just checked my mileage records and - in the new one - my mileage per tank has ranged between 419 and 497 miles (between fill ups). As mentioned, I do use V power diesel, which generally adds about 8-10% to the range per tank.

Alan

[renstar]

Thanks. I'm definitely not overly revving the engine, I try and stick to below 2K rpm unless I'm overtaking or coming out of a junction. One of the things I love about the Cx-5 is the gear shift indicator so that takes away a lot of the guesswork 90% of the time. I feel like I'm becoming overly obsessed with this, partly because it's hard to ignore the mpg indicator on the dash! I've read so much about how to drive to maximise fuel economy and its just galling to be putting in so much effort and not getting anywhere with it. To be honest, it's really ruining my enjoyment of the car.

There may be some merit in the MK issue, I do notice on return from driving down the A5 or M1 that it drops a bit when I hit MK's billion roundabouts and this was the same in my old car but it was 1-2mpg at most. However, our second car is a 2011 Kuga 2L Diesel. With 54K on the clock, average mpg is 46 around MK and the Kuga is meant to be less economical than the cx-5 if you go with the published  literature.  I was expecting similar if not better with the cx-5. I'm filling up with supermarket diesel, have never tried a premium fuel before and I would resent to have to resort to using it to get decent fuel consumption. However, I will try this at my next fill up.

I filled up only last week Thursday, I haven't done a long drive except 15-20 miles max around town over 5 days, mostly at a speed of 40-60mph. I'm already more than quarter tank down.  I really hope it improves with time and mileage otherwise I will have to seriously consider letting it go. Love everything else about the car but I won't be able to afford to run it at that rate if it continues as we have no plans to move from MK.

[Bert321]

Hi form a newbie.  I don't want to provoke an argument (and it's my first post), but let me throw a different perspective into the mix.

A new CX 5 is somewhere mid £20k range to buy.  It'll be worth about half that in three years, so it'll lose ten grand give or take (plus interest if applicable).
It'll need serviced a couple of times too, let's say £400.
It might need a couple of tyres too, lets say £100.
Maybe a set of front brakes, say £200.
You say you've done 1000 miles in around a month, so lets assume you'll do 12000 miles per year, and that let's call diesel £6/gallon.
12000 miles @ average 37mpg = 324 gallons, or £1944
12000 miles @ average 46mpg = 261 gallons, or £1566

Over a 3 year ownership the costs are:
Depreciation            10000  or   10000
Servicing                     400            400
Maintenance                300            300
Road tax x 3 years         90              90
Insurance x 3 years     750            750 
Fuel x 3 years            5832          4698
Total                       17372        16238

Break that back down to average per month, it's £482  against £451 (and that's without paying any interest).

Obviously the above sums can vary drastically on how you buy/finance the car, how much you get as a trade in, how long you keep it etc etc, but you get my drift.

IMHO it's not the extra £31 of fuel that makes the difference, it's whether the four hundred and odd quid per month is too much in the first place.