Volvo DRIVe Fuel Economy Competition: 3.1 liters/100 km

It seems that Volvo’s DRIVe models created a new trend: the challenge is to drive the car as economically as you can, and the winner is the team with the lowest fuel consumption.

One of these challenges took place from Zurich to Göteborg and involved three teams of two drivers each. There was one male team, one female team and one mixed team. Each drove a Volvo V50 DRIVe, covering 1,535 kilometers from Zurich to Göteborg on a single tank of fuel. All the participants were ordinary drivers picked out from among readers of Switzerland's biggest daily newspaper, Blick. Amazingly, all three completed the challenge with average fuel consumption of less than 3.2 liters/100 km.

The competition took about 24 hours of driving spread on three days, and the winner was the mixed team formed by Claudia Fortes and Christoph Saur. They had used 47.59 liters of diesel, an average of 3.1 liters per 100 kilometers. This is 21 percent lower than the official fuel consumption figure for the Volvo V50 DRIVe with Start/Stop function.

"We soon became accustomed to being overtaken, particularly on the German Autobahn, since we drove at a slower speed," says Claudia Fortes. "But it was worth it! It was a real adventure to drive economically."

The DRIVe models are equipped with a special set of efficiency-enhancing features and marked with the DRIVe emblem to display their uprated environment properties. This means that the Volvo V50 DRIVe used for the competition not only has a low fuel consumption, but also has a low CO2 emissions of just 107 g/km.