Ok, deduct the 5% error on the trip computer, plus I decided to stick between 60 and 65 MPH for the whole motorway

part of my journey. With the horrendous tailbacks etc when travelling on the friday afternoon of a bank holiday weekend

it wasn't too hard to keep the speed down But still pretty good I reckon.

How on earth did you do that? The only way I could manage that would be to reset the gauge, roll down a hill in neutral, and I reckon it would still be no better than 45mpg !!!

If thats the mileage for the whole trip Dave then its brilliant, I have posted my mpg showing 60+ but that was only for about 50 miles and i was doing my very best to achieve this, then i found out that my OBC shows about 10% out I have just been done on a speed camera 35 in a 30 zone would you believe, on an open country road as well so going to have to be a bit more carefull, hopefully this will improve my fuel consumption.. I once virtually coasted the last 3 miles into Pitlochry + achieved 98.5mpg. stew See pic below but not realistic i hasten to add

Averaged 58 [OBC] on Sunday on a trip of 118 miles that started on Glos /Oxon border and took me on the A417 and A329 along the Vale of the White Horse , over the Berkshire downs with lots of up and down twisty stuff and sheep [waved to Ducerduncs when I saw the Didcot towers - he will know the road I suspect], along the Thames at Streatley and Pangbourne into and through Reading centre where I got caught in a traffic jam caused by a lot of Gay folk marching to show their pride , into a housing estate to collect a shiny rear bar [e-bay bargin at £26] and then back home along the M4 via Swindon [cruisecontrol]. Didn't break any speed limits but didn't hang about either . Started with a full tank and only myself in the RAV. Actually averaged 62mpg on the outward leg.
I put it down to the fact that I had only just waxed the RAV with Carnauba and it was really slippery
Have been keeping a record since new and at 15200 miles the overall average is 42.8 calculated.

One of my favourite journeys down through Streatley and Pangbourne along side the river. When Iveco had their place at Langley, I used to stay at the Copper or the George in Pangbourne and walk along the river in the evening (brill!) and watch Dunc's forerunners hurtle up and down the GW mainline - noisey bgrs!

Shcm has recorded some really good fuel consumption and will hopefully comment when he looks in. Going to work over the hills (LH will tell you they are steep around here!) I tend to get high 30s/low 40s. BTW I found Excellium diesel the other day at Hull but only when I started putting it in did I get the price on the display £121.9 . It runs really nice on it though

My best ever "brim-to-brim" full tank MPG was 51.51. All the way from Saltaire to Shaffhausen. The OBC said 58.5, so about an 11.9% error. From here to Hull the OBC said 68! Still can't make any sense of the errors, there seems to be no common reason for their magnitude. Best ( least ) error was 5.3% in September '08 and worst 18.2% in December '08. It seems to average about 10.6%. Capacity of the tank is interesting: biggest ever refill was just over 55 litres, but I normally put in just over 50. Average since new: 40.9 MPG.

HA you 4.3 lot cant have it all your own way...

So for us 4.2 owners here's mine....(doubt the petrol mob will get near)



All true and above board.........Govnor

My best is 45.6 MPG Tank to tank and the OBC stated av 50.4 MPG so know where near that but its something to aim for
Normally i average 41 MPG tank to tank with mixed driving , Im happy with that !!!

Well my onboard computer recorded 43 mpg during a very gentle 170 mile run and when I put my rose coloured glasses on and checked the consumption it was exactly spot on ..... honest.... Er ok I havn't checked but I can only dream of your consumption figures.
I did know what I was getting myself into though when I bought the car. I drove the D4D and it straight away went up to 40+ mpg.. then I drove the T180 and could only dream of such high figures.
You pays your money and you makes your choice... I just chose a bit more Ooomph and a few more toys.
Mereside

60.7 pathetic Chatters


60.8 + fully loaded + in Scotland not Essex where theres barely a hill worth mentioning

Arrr but my outside temperature beats yours....

We had hills in Essex....Just last time some Manchurians came to visit... they nicked em....

I've had mid to high 50's over quite a few runs but over a true full tank brim to brim my best for 53mpg which i thought was extremely impressive although a much more realistic daily avg is 43mpg for where its driven and what it is used for.

Which is exactly what my T180 Auris does, my last tank brim to brim on the t180 was 44mpg and i'm showing 46mpg now but this always drops slightly as i do more mixed driving.


All in, i'm happy with the consumption of my toyota diesels, especially the Rav as it does have guts and lugs a great family car.


And i don't drive slowly, just v.smoothly. Incidentally i also had a new Avensis estate 150bhp diesel which i drove a good 1k. For the most part it averaged a very nice 47mpg with a truely stuffed car. Which managed 42mpg after lots of hill driving and town journeys.

Chip em all and get more MPG

Oh L_H's is chipped

Kingo

It was the scousers nicked your hills + flogged them to us Mancs
Notice also, I had a full tank which costs Lewis Hamilton 0.2573467854 secs a lap, I think this is worth mentioning with regards to my fuel consumption, if i had a lighter fuel load especially up the hills (which you haven't got) i could have achieved 60.9 mpg

Yeh and you fitted them wrong and now Manchester is full of huge holes.

Hey Stewpot, less rounding up, we like accurate info here. You round your fares in the same way?

How can someone from Derbyshire say Manchester is full of holes Ours are noble holes caused by things like the manchester bomb
In Derbyshire you call your holes caverns + turn them into tourist attractions selling bits of shiny stone for hundreds of £s to gullible foreigners

We'll do anything for money!!!

Well apart from working for a living or driving trains.....

Seems National Express gets all their staff from Derbyshire.....

We get single time plus £20 for a Sunday and I think that is OK. I'd sack those greedy bgrs at London Midland. No wonder they volounteer for Sundays, they must be getting arond £350 for one day (and was there a day in lieu as well?). Half of them would end up stacking shelves if they lost their jobs as they date back to the day you could get promoted from a carriage cleaner. None of that now and the assessments are very hard. I addressed 100 applicants for 3 driving jobs at a recruitment function a few weeks ago and real good professional people were vitually in tears as the day went on and they got eliminated. They had been wittled down from an original 500 applicants.

And you are right Chatters, it is the easiest money I have ever earned. I just have to be prepared to keep my wits when something goes wrong or somebody throws themself under but other than that it is money for old rope!!!

Hi - and thanks for depressing me! The best I seem to be able to get from my 2 litre petrol Rav4.2 is 29.1mpg [which I reset every thousand miles or so]. Next time I change my wheels I will be aiming for a diesel... Jo

Hi and welcome to the meandering mayhem that is the RAV section of the TOC. This is the place where drifting off topic has been reduced to an artform - generally by the moderators The diesel/petrol debate is rarely off the radar here for more than a few weeks. I think the general concensus is that you need to be doing more than average mileage to make the capital investment in diesel pay off. HOWEVER, the price differential on the fuels has just about disappeared ( thank goodness ) and the upward trend in fuel prices seems inevitable, so even if you have to rely on residual value to balance the books I can't see you loosing out by going for diesel.

If you stick arround one of our caledonian cousins, Bothwell Buyer will log in and explain that if you want 400BHP on tap, you can't rely on Kingo's diesel chips to provide it. He is not around so much at the moment as he is busy converting Anchorman's train to run on 2 Toyota F1 engines, but he will be back ( we hope )!

Don,t be depressed mate, if you knew what i had to do to achieve 60.8 mpg which is totally inaccurate by the way, I'd sooner top myself than drive like that forever, despite the figures you are seeing, 40mpg is about the most we see driving reasonably normal, and if you have a petrol you won't get the dreaded DMF at £1600 to cure, so if you add that into the calculation theres plenty to be said for sticking with petrol.. The other mans grass is not always greener Stew

Trouble is stewpot, if you don't drive like that you might run out of points!!! Between the devil and the deep blue sea..................

You can always rely on some sympathy from the Moderators Stew!

I did offer him a file .

Sorry if I seem unsympathetic Stew. Just to make up for it here is some good advice. Whatever you do don't drop the soap in the shower

Bit late, but back on topic(ish)



Well possibly, but I'm not sure they are any better than anybody else.

Just for the collection, here's my only photo of completely inaccurate mpg:



I tend to run 400 miles between fills most of the time. For calculated values:

The best I ever achieved with the 4.2 was 51mpg, which was far higher than the official extra urban figure.

I've not done so well with the 4.3. It's better on a "combined" (mway + urban) run than the 4.2, but not so good on a long haul run yet. Best I've managed is 49.4 calculated, but the vehicle was very heavily loaded and coming down the A9 from Inverness, it felt like I was running into a very strong headwind for 100 miles or so at least, which doesn't help.

Did get 99.9 up for a few miles after re-fueling, much like LH did.

Recently the error between my actual and displayed mpg, seems to be getting smaller again. Look at the graph in my sig and you'll see the two lines started close together, then moved apart and are now coming back together again. I have no explanation at the moment. Something is probably just wearing somewhere. Possibly both the divergence and convergence are both related to long distance runs, but not exactly conclusive at all. Still it is nice to have a display that is only about 1 to 2 mpg out at the moment.

I also get the feeling the vehicle is very slightly less economical after the Mr T. ECU re-flash, but I haven't analysed it properly.

if I was you. I'd be spending my time converting red diesel to clear.... to make up for all those gear changes you need to do before reaching 40mph.

as for the 2 litre doing 29mpg - I must ask in my best English (pewk) how on earth do you manage that?

I get 21-25mpg with my 400+bhp 1998cc, 0-60ft in less than 2 seconds and runnning revs up to 7000rpm. Do you know (ken) that the RAV actually has more than 2 forward gears?

My other RAV running at 270bhp just now does around 24mpg, but then its used for short trips to the local shop.

Quite impressively, our 2006 Transit Luton van does about 350 miles on a tank of diesel, altho haven't tried the red stuff in it yet.

Best I've done on a road trip was 28.3 mpg. That would be about 34 mpg in Imperial gallons. Not bad for a 269 hp V6 and auto tranny.

Mmmmm! - I wondered about that as well. Have a feeling that max torque is less than it was - maybe to reduce the flywheel problem?

Agree with above, mine seems slightly heavier on fuel since ecu update although slightly smoother, or are we just noticing that fuel has gone up in price

I suspected mine certainly wasn't any better from the day it was done and only credited better ful consumption to improving weather. As a matter of interest I took my EGR off the other day and although it was sooty as you might expect inside an exhaust, I wouldn't call it carboned up. I don't know how much is down to the flash, how much is down to only high grade fuel and how much is down to fresh oil at regular intervals???

I gave it a flush out with carb cleaner and it looked like new. I can life with the fuel consumption if it behaves in other ways.

Anchorman,
are you going to write up ( pictures? ) your EGR removal and clean? Personally, it sounds like excellent preventitive maintenance and something that I would be happy to do. Can't remember if I've said this before, but my brother and I both bought identical XT5s at the same time from the same dealer. Mine runs on Shell almost all the time and his runs on the weasely stuff from the supermarket. As they have done very similar mileages I am tempted to do both vehicles and see if there is any difference in carbon build up. It would hardly be definitive evidence, but it would be an interesting "indication". How many miles have you got on yours now?

Had mine in for it's 20K service last week, ECU upgrade also done. Driving back home on motorway I thought it seemed

a bit sluggish / flat ?

It's very easy to do and I did take some photo's but the battery in the camera ran flat so I don't have any of the finished article. I will post a bit later......

Sit tight!!!

Hi Chris

I would also be very interested in your comparison of the two EGR valves. Mine has done about 22k and has run on almost exclusively high grade diesel and I was expecting the carbon to resemble the hard crusty stuff that you get in the upper cylinder but in fact it was quite soft, more like soot. Here is an over view of cleaning the valve;

Start by pulling the plastic cover off. Obviously the exhaust needs to be quite cool as it is very dangerous when hot.

You need to start by removing the plug from the EGR valve. Squeeze the clip and pull off the connector;



Now with a 12mm socket, undo the two bolts on the cylinder head;



.....and the two on top of the EGR valve;



Be careful not to drop the gaskets and lift the pipe off. Next undo the two remaining bolts in the top of the EGR valve;



As the bolts are flanged, I had to just remove the two bolts in the cover and wiring harness mounting bracket to allow them to clear;



Now lift off the valve. This is the engine side;



......and this is the upper inlet;



You can see the carbon inside. I then used an old paintbrush and a tin of carburettor cleaner to wash out both sides of the valve.



My camera battery went flat so I cannot show the finished result but I can tell you that with little effort it was nearly as bright and shiney as the outside. This photo is of the opening into the inlet manifold. I didn't bother with it because I didn't want to get carbon inside the manifold and given how soft the sooty deposit was I reckon the whole of the inside of the manifold would be similar and it was not hard enough for build ups to cause an obstruction;



The main thing is that I believe I have cleaned enough out to eliminate or reduce the risk of the valve sticking. When refitting the valve I just cleaned all of the mating surfaces with a light rub with wire wool (it comes clean very easily) and the whole job took no more than 20-30 minutes. Refitting is just the reversal and don't forget to pop the plug back on before the ignition is energised or it will throw up a fault code.

For those that don't fancy doing it, don't worry too much as it is covered by an extended 5 year or 100,000 mile warranty but I considered it a kind of insurance policy rather than risk it sticking and having to "limp" home. In the event, I doubt it would have stuck because the carbon was so soft but it will be interesting to see your comparison Chris as it will tell us more about the risk.

Cheers

mmmmm makes you think that TGB do know about the flywheel probs then ay?lol

Awesome Anchorman,

Cheers

Very much regret not had time to read all the posts on MPG but just back from a short holiday in Yorkshire.

670 miles total mileage - onboard computer reset when filled up at home with Morrisons diesel - average for whole trip 39.7 MPG - mixed motorway, steep hills up and down - many minutes crawling in traffic in York, Scarboro., Whitby etc, a fast trip to Alnwick and back to York and last day back to Derbyshire - and yes I had a spare wheel for the T180 with me and used the super performance of the T180 much of the time!

Do not think that was too bad as the Aircon was on much of the time - yes Yorkshire was very hot last weekend but Scarboro. and Whitby will be avoided like the plague next time as all car parks were full up.
Guy

Just filled mine for the first time...

Covered 464.2 miles and filled it with 45.83 litres, giving me 46.05 mpg

Not bad considering the advertised mpg is 48.7

I've just had a week around mid/sth Wales, got to say stunning scenery + not a dual carriageway anywhere, I would tell you where I've been if i could only spell some of the place names other than Tenby, one place we saw was CWMYPTIL or similar, looked like the bottom line of an eyesight chart Anyway I digress or Dai-gres in Welsh.. I did three tank to tank fills + despite my OBC showing an overall average of 49.7mpg for the whole trip of 730mls, my true consumption was little better than 40-41mpg, which for a large car mostly fully laden is not bad but a little dissapointing compared to the OBC figure.. P.S if anyone wants a job thats recession proof become a signwriter in Wales they must make a fortune + nobody can tell if youv'e spelt it wrong Stew

In my 02plate VX petrol, recently i've been getting 29.8mpg, best ever was 34mpg going upto longbridge in birmingham up the m40 from buckinghamshire. Would people consider that a respectable MPG? Must admit (on occasion) I do have a bit of heavy foot ..

And while I'm here.. Whats everyones thoughts/comments/views on getting an ECU re-map for it? Most people I've spoken to said being a petrol, there would be very little gain, of either performance or MPG Others have also suggested trying the other usual trick of new exhaust.. something custom made by topgear in aylesbury that'll let the engine breath a bit and hopefully get me some more torque at least.. Or is this all bull?

I suppose what I'm really getting at is, does anyone have any suggestions of easy tricks there are increasing MPG or performance.

Cheers for your comments/tips/advice.

T

Anchs - did you renew any of the gaskets when you did that?

I'm slightly curious about it too and might whip the valve off mine to have a look at the next oil change. Like Chris, I'm willing to do pictures for comparison if you want (although obviously it won't be as good a comparison as Chris'), or do you have enough data now?

Cheers.

Didn't renew the gaskets. They are very good quality stainless steel and wipe off like new.

Always interested how you go on so yes, please report with piccies! I missed the view of the valve after cleaning so that would be good.

You can actually get EGR cleaner so might be worth a try;

http://www.wynnoil.co.uk/home.php

OK then, took it apart today, so here are some photos for the "EGR valve compare and contrast scrap book" . Enjoy!

If you want to be pseudo-scientific about it, here are the facts and figures. This is at just short of 30k miles. Vehicle has run on the following over time:

Tesco Diesel - 32%
Esso Diesel - 4%
BP Ultimate - 3% (It seemed to run like an out of condition fish on that. Sorry, wouldn't touch it again)
Shell V Power Diesel - 18%
Shell Diesel (called Extra isn't it?) - 43%

Of late it runs mostly on Shell, with occasionally V Power Diesel.

deposits were soft and sooty.

Manifold:



Valve body exhaust port:



Valve body manifold port:



Then after cleaning. Not quite as bright as a new pin, but probably OK:



You can just about see the clean valve "stem", but not really any of the valve itself. I believe the valve actuates by moving right to left (it's in the left hand bit of the housing):



Whadya think? About the same state as Anch's before cleaning?

Easy bit of hopefully, preventative maintenance.

SHCM, didn't you use Millers diesel additive for a while, or have i got the wrong person? If so would that keep the EGR etc cleaner, I use it when i fill up with ordinary diesel, but mainly I use shell ultimate, TBH not noticed any difference whatsoever...Stew

You're right! Forgot to mention I'd tried just the one bottle of Millers.

I used to notice the difference with V power, but lately don't. That might be post ecu-reflash, but can't be sure.

Nice work shcm!

I would like to compare one that has run on supermarket weasel pee to see if the carbon is harder (enough to cause it to stick). It sounds like yours was the same as mine in that the soot was very soft and easy to clean. In that respect I guess the valve will to some extent be self purging.

Stewpot

The valve is effectively sitting in the exhaust so it will always be sooty. I think we would benefit in making some comparisons between grades of diesel.

BTW stop putting lager in your diesel - its a waste.