I’ve just filled up the car for the first time since changing jobs. Looking at the usage aside from the trip to Abingdon on Friday it has been three weeks of commuting every day, and the usual mix of local running around for domestic duties like shopping, Church and so on. When I was working for SSE, the similar mix of commuting and local domestic duties required a fill up every week. (Also worth considering that with the current price of fuel around here, a fill up usually costs over £40.) So looking at the result of the move in purely fuel costs, I’ve saved about two-thirds.
Of course, if you bear in mind that the new journey is only a tenth of the distance from home than SSE, you realise that the car is running considerably less efficiently than before, and this is reflected in the MPG figures that I got over the last three weeks. Usually, during the winter months with the winter blend diesel and colder temperatures the Golf does between 46 and 48 miles per gallon (it rises to between 48 and 50 miles per gallon in the summer), however over the past three weeks the Golf averaged 38 miles per gallon. It is worth bearing in mind when looking at that figure that it is still better than the Focus ever managed on the trips down to SSE, where it averaged around 34 miles per gallon…