A few of you may have seen Jeremy Clarkson's amazing feat of driving 800 miles in an Audi A8 Diesel on one tank of gas. Well, i thought i'd give it a try on my 10 hour drive from Johnson City, TN to Philladelphia, PA and this was the amazing result.

First off, unlike Jeremy's adventure, i did not get all excess weight out of the CLK before leaving, in fact, i had supplies for a 10 week internship crammed in solid from the driver's seat back...


(note, these pics were taken at the gas station in PA)

Next, i did follow his advice about filling up early in the morning. The cold air is supposed to make the fuel denser so that you can get more actual miles out of the tank of gas. Filled up at a BP in Johnson City around 8:15AM.

Also note, that i ran the radio, ipod, and AC almost the entire time. I put the AC on 72 and had it on the lowest setting. I also stopped once along the way. AC greatly diminishes fuel efficiency. Clarkson kept AC (but would have been using heat, it was cold) off except for one brief instance where he broke down and turned it on.

Alright, so here's the chronology of my trip...
148 miles in (see the trip odometer, i reset it at the station)




Hit a little bit of traffic in VA. This lasted about half an hour and the stop and go probably diminished my MPG (the third quarter of the tank didnt last as long)


Back in business, took this while going around a bend.


Now, im getting nervous. there are no gas stations around and the light is on. At this point i turned off the AC, radar detector, radio, and ipod and began to sweat (nervousness and lack of AC will do that).



Here's the pump in PA.


516 miles on 14.637 gallons is 35.25mpg. Not that spectacular, but not too bad for a heavily loaded mercedes with a stock estimate of 28 mpg highway (when empty).

So, my advice...
1) if you run your AC, run it cold and not on full blast.
2) on the highway, use the cruise controll stick to change speeds (obviously not if you have to brake suddenly or accellorate suddenly, but if the speed limit changes from 65 to 70, or if the general pace of traffic slows use the stick to gradually change speed. This keeps you from burning up excess fuel. You can go fast as long as you keep your speed constant and only change your speed gradually. This whole time my engine was running below 3000 rpm (cruising rpms were about 2500).

So there you go, you dont have to be a smug hybrid driving tree hugger to get good gas mileage.

 

cool king320! that sounds like it was a really exciting trip! good job

 

pretty good! did you use the "distance to empty" feature to know exactly how much gas you had left once the light came on, or did you just go off of the fuel guage? this is my first mercedes, so I am not sure how accurate it is...i know in my saab it fluctuates all the time, so its really not that accurate

 

You took digital pictures of your gauge cluster doing 70mph?!?!?!
Good story though. I'll put it to the test one of these days. I have a 430 so I probably won't get the results you did. Good job and thanks for sharing!

 

Nicely done. You made us all proud.

My target is to squeeze out 650km from my 500 engine, now that I am piling on kilometers travelling every weekend to my girlfriend's place about 150 km from mine. So far the best squeeze amounted to 570km. To get to the intended target (404 miles), that's a whopping 24.67mpg that my baby needs to come through with.

The problem is that I sometimes drive too fast on my way there on Friday evenings , but now that I have read your post, I am more than getting this thing mpg'ed. Wish me luck

 

That is freaking amazing! I didn't know CLK's could get that much gas mileage? Maybe I'm not too disappointed from losing my Civic for my CLK. But i don't think my cabriolet will get that much mileage since its heavier? But still its comforting to hear that you drove that long! So basically fill up when its cold, (not a problem in the NW), use cruise control as much as I can for long distances at gradual changes? Nice.