Petrol v diesel cars

Headshot wrote: »

Hi all.

I'm thinking of getting a new car but im tempted to go down petrol as the car will be cheaper but i'm wondering is it a false economy as i do a lot of mileage

I do 510km a week so is getting petrol a waste of time and if so how much extra roughly a week would petrol cost me extra?

Well if you take diesel at 1.20 a litre and petrol at 1.30 and use sensible fuel efficiencies like 5 or 6 l/100km for diesel on motorway and 6 or 7 for petrol relative to a specific vehicle which you can look up on sites like honest John a general annual comparison is pretty easy to calculate.

So if you do 20,000km a year then divide by 100. So 200 x 5. 5l/100km x 1.2 = 1320 EU a year for diesel. Or 1690 for petrol at 6.5l/100km. So 370 extra a year for petrol which you multiply across your predicted ownership time. So if you intend to keep for 5 years that's 1850 extra in fuel.

As you can see it's not a huge difference which is why hybrids offer no real cost benefit. Vehicle capital cost is the biggest thing you pay as well as interest on that which most of us borrow. On a 25k car the extra in fuel over 5 years above is just 7% of the total car cost which decreases once tax, insurance, parking, tolls and servicing and repairs are added in.

Headshot wrote: »

I hope I'm not deviating to much for my original question but now about 510km a week on a Hybrid petrol?

Just curious to know is it a very bad idea economy wise?

You'll probably get about 5.4L/100km, depending on the hybrid.

Headshot wrote: »

New Model Rav4

You'll probably only get around 6.7L/100KM in that hybrid, quite a big car and engine.

mp3guy wrote: »

You'll probably only get around 6.7L/100KM in that hybrid, quite a big car and engine.

This isn't aimed at the op but I can't help point out the contradiction of wanting a large engined suv which is both inefficient due to shape and size and has in this case a large engine and is expensive and then worrying about an extra 20 quid of fuel a week.