Baby Skoda makes 2006km on a single tank
World economy driving champ Gerhard Plattner has piloted a Skoda Fabia GreenLine from Austria to Denmark and back on just one tank fullIt's known in the auto business as 'hypermiling' and while it's all about world records and driving, you're not likely to see it on Sports Tonight any time soon.
Hypermiling is the 'sport' of extracting every last unit of distance from every last drop in a fuel tank. In some parts of the world it really is treated as a sport – Europe and the US host a number of competitive hypermiling events.
Earlier this month Austrian Gerhard Plattner, who resides in the Vettel-Stoner league of hypermiling, took a Skoda Fabia GreenLine from Austria to Denmark and back on a single 45-litre tank of diesel fuel.
The super-eco GreenLine versions of Skoda's little hatch run small turbodiesel engines – a 1.4-litre four and, as found in Plattner's car, a 1.2-litre three-cylinder putting out just 56kW and 180Nm. Predictably, it's no Viper-wiper, cantering from 0-100km/h in a leisurely 12.6 seconds, but hey, when you're behind the wheel of a machine like this, you're not in need of speed.
Hypermilers will instead be more impressed by the little Skoda's combined-cycle 3.4L/100km. For a car of its size, that puts it somewhere close to a league of its own. Drivers with serious foot-off experience can do better. Plattner's journey, for example, saw it average 2.2L/100km.
That might seem dubious save for the eagle eye of the International Police Motor Corporation (IPMC – organising body for a series of rallies and other competitive motoring events for police workers), representatives of which sealed the fuel tank before he set out from the Austrian town of Reutte, and supervised the trip from go to whoa.
Plattner's impressive figure was assisted by his choice of route: much of the drive to the Danish town of Bov was on Germany's longest autobahn. The 960km A7 bisects the country straight up the middle, from the Austrian border to the Danish border.
Plattner works closely with parent company Volkswagen, having set records in Seat models in the past and more recently worked with Skoda on the second-generation GreenLine lineup.
The company has firmed up plans to bring conventional Fabia models to Australia late this year. The local lineup will not include GreenLine models.
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