How Can I Improve My MPG

[BT]

Hello Retro rides.

I am in need of some help and advice. I have a K74 crew cab L200 and I am incredibly happy with it, however, I have a problem. The fuel this thing consumes is somewhat uneconomical and is kind of pushing me to look at replacing it with something boring and economical.

On a motorway run at about 60/65mph I am getting about 20mpg.

The truck is standard height but does have mud terain 31" tyres fitted with an Insta turbo tread pattern. Other than that it's a standard high mileage L200. I have a rear Ifor Williams canopy and a pair of roof bars fitted.

Is there anything I can do to increase the miles I get per gallon?

I realise the tyres probably don't help, would swapping to a standard road tread tyre of the same size help? What about getting some larger tyres, would that then reduce my RPM at 60 and in turn increase my fuel?

Would a decat or EGR blank help with fuel consumption?

I have found myself trying to find a petrol so that I can LPG it. But they seem super hard to come by.

Is there any tricks or tips out there that could help?

[duggers]

l200 has the aerodynamic properties of a large brick wall so you're not going to improve things massively whatever you do.
You have identified some possibilities already; roof bars are an easy improvement, off road tyres will have a much larger rolling resistance than something road biased ones.
Also what unnecessary tat are you carrying around in the back, weight saving can help.

The biggest factor beyond these is your driving style, hard acceleration and lots of braking uses far more fuel than smooth planned progress.
My friend runs the same wagon and he averages about 24mpg so there doesn't seem to be that much room for improvement but i'm sure some other wise words are en-route

[darrenh]

the thing that saps energy is not so much the radius of the tyre, but tyre wall deformation. so big baloon offroad tyres are a killer

i was gonna just say "drive slower" but if you are strict 60 then its not practical

energy requred to push a car against air drag and losses associated with the tyres and drive train scale with the speed cubed, so even dropping to 60 from 65 will make a huge difference

[optimusprime]

Jan 5, 2017 18:51:44 GMT BT said:

Hello Retro rides.

I am in need of some help and advice. I have a K74 crew cab L200 and I am incredibly happy with it, however, I have a problem. The fuel this thing consumes is somewhat uneconomical and is kind of pushing me to look at replacing it with something boring and economical.

On a motorway run at about 60/65mph I am getting about 20mpg.


What about getting some larger tyres, would that then reduce my RPM at 60

Is there any tricks or tips out there that could help?

In theory it sounds good ,,,,, however in the real world,larger tyres affect your gearing.
You will notice a difference when going up hill,you need more revs to counteract the the rolling resistance.
My old Disco had bigger tyres,and it was great off rd,horrid on road,it upset the gearing,had no guts going over the Penines on the M62 ....had to drop down into 4th just to keep going at times!

[welshpug]

they only ever did 25 mpg tops from New IIRC. so 20 with big tyres isn't too far off really!


get that van, you'll save a fair bit on fuel.

[Ryannn]

If it's a 2.5 like my Pajero, I can watch the needle go down on a run. I used to use it for work and my allowance was only a couple of pence per mile more than it actually cost in fuel!

I'd look for an LPG one, if I had to use mine for anything other than going to the tip, I probably wouldn't still have it...

[pistonpopper]

I had an L200 as well, and it was terrible on fuel!



I reckon if I was lucky I was getting 20mpg with my lightest shoes on! I only kept it about two weeks! Plan was to sell my Chevsuzu, and keep the L200, chance to sell the L200 came along and it was gone! Still have the Chevsuzu, and that does far better mpg than the L200.

[darrenh]

not sure how buying a petrol LPG is gonna help, unless you are bodging a bottle of calor gas onto it ? half the price of diesel, twice the consumption

[ChasR]

I was going to say and IME the quality of many LPG kits, even sequential items is variable at best!

[Mantasport]

You could see marginal gaines in efficiency from removing the roof bars, and fitting road tread tyres. But it will only be a little bit, nothing to get excited about. On a road car they used to say you could see 1mpg from roof bars, on yours it would probably be less than that (might not even show up on mpg readings)
I could see road tyres making a small difference but the outlay for buying 4 new tyres (or tyres and wheels if you want to keep the knobblies for winter) is going to be a big chunk of cash, which would take a long time to re-coup from the potential fuel saving.

Sorry to say if you NEED more fuel economy you could drive slower (yeah i know its a nonsense idea, but it would work!) or get a different car.
If you do enough mileage on the motorway a cheap boring economical old diesel car (astra/pug etc that does 50mpg) if bought for £500 ish would recoupe the buying cost in a short time, and allow you to keep the L200 for other normal driving.

[waveman1500]

You can actually put LPG injection on a diesel. Apparently this helps with fuel consumption and also increases performance, but I have no personal experience with it. The idea is that you burn slightly less diesel, plus a little bit of LPG, which is intended to help improve combustion efficiency of the diesel.

[Darkspeed]

1. Don't use revs over 2000
2. Don't drive over 54 MPH
3. If over 54MPH is required slipstream large wagons

I have a decat and EGR blank on mine but did not notice any great difference in MPG.

'03 Warrior double cab, Mitsubishi hard top, 128K, road tyres.

Typically 25+MPG local driving - and 32+MPG on a run when towing

The MPG difference between 54 and 65 huge.
Under 2000 keeps it off boost.

To get economy from any vehicle you just have to remove all of the aspects that make them enjoyable to drive.....

If it's fly by wire - then remove and plug the vacuum pipe to the turbo actuator and put a bit of black tape over the EML. That will enable 1,2,3 above without you having to think about it......

[steveo3002]

set of tyres or this /that will take ages to recover the money and get back into saving

id say other than a good service and pum up the tyres you might as well sell it and get something more suitable that does 40-50mpg ...or would having an additional puddle jumper car work for you when the truck isnt needed

[BT]

Thank you all very much indeed for the amount of help that has been offered here, as I suspected there isn't anything that can be done to really improve my fuel consumption.

I will quite happily sit at 60ish mph but even that seems dangerous at times due to the rate that s lot of lunatics drive around here, any less than 60 would be some what of a death wish.

I never carry any huge weight in it for any longer than a day (IE collecting or delivering). To be honest I don't need a 4x4 by any stretch of the imagination... I just want one!

I have had a rather generous offer on the van from a chap I work with, so I will be taking it in for him to have a nose st on Monday and the decision has unfortunately been made to sell it. I have two vehicles with the same kind of fuel consumption, one I can deal with the other I can not, so this one must go unfortunately.

Would a smaller single can pick up have any better fuel consumption? Or perhaps a 2wd version? I do like trucks. Just can't handle their fuel consumption.

Thabms for all of the help.

[gazzab1978]

this is the very reason i got rid of mine, had a 2002 twincab animal a few years ago and it just drank fuel for fun, at first i thought someone was draining the tank as the mrs was using a tank a week just trundling to work and back.
loved the truck but couldnt justify the fuel it was using as a daily.
newer shape ones are a lot better on fuel

[BT]

I also thought something was wrong initially, however over the year I've owned it I have become accustomed to it.

If I had to trundle across fields, or use its off road capabilities regularly then I could probably take the fuel consumption on the chin. But when my TDI caddy van did the job perfectly and returned 45+mpg in the process it seems silly to put up with the poor fuel of the L200.

[Mantasport]

You could get an old 300tdi discovery and run it on veg oil. Only about 25mpg but about half the cost on fuel if you buy new oil. Use to do that on mine.

[BT]

Thanks for the suggestion Mantasport.

I looked into the veg oil option once before and my reader h at the time suggested that there wasnt a huge financial advantage to it, given that at the time diesel costs has dropped to not much more per litre than diesel, however I could have interpreted it wrong at the time.

I don't cover a huge amount of miles, however I recently bought an A3 TDI as a little run around over winter seen as I have some longer journeys to run. The 55mpg I have been getting out of that has certainly been noticed over the 20mpg of the truck. I think if I could regularly get 35mpg out of it then I would keep it hit that doesn't seem possible.

Unfortunately at the moment I have far too many vehicles and I need to cut the down drastically. It's just finding the most viable option financially, and a 20mpg daily doesn't really help. If it was a dodge ram, I could stomach it.

[alecf]

I ran a 2007 l200 animal with the ralliart tuning box. Had 20" wheels on with Toyo road tyres.
I used to run it in 2wd most of the time as it would only get about 22mpg I could if I took my time get around 26-28 or on a motorway run 30 just about at 65mph.
However 80k miles of driving (mostly town) I used to average about 24.ish.

They aren't great none of these big motors are anything like a diesel car.
I now have a 2 year old t5 van 2.0tdi 140bhp with a 7 speed dsg box. I used to have a mk5 golf gt tdi 140 mapped to 175bhp.
Used to get 40mpg no matter how hard it was driven or 60mpg carefully on a run averaging 52mpg for the wife running around.
My van which never caries out and is used as a car does about 27mpg 32 on a careful run. Yet I drive it steadier then the golf.

[BT]

Your Golf will have the same BKD 2.0 TDI engine as my A3. Like you say they're pretty economic. Mine is struggling with a vein issue in the turbo which is driving my nuts at the moment. However the amount of times I stop in the petrol station has halved.