Travelled the whole distance from Bangalore to Hyderabad & back with a slight deviation on one tank of fuel
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A few months back, I did a trip from Bangalore to Hyderabad and back. During this trip, on my way back, I decided to try out if I could complete the trip without having to refuel. I almost made it to Bangalore, but had to refuel near Chikkaballapura, since the car was running on fumes by then.
This got me thinking if I could do a Bangalore-Hyderabad-Bangalore trip on a single fuel tank if I planned my trip better and drove consistently from the beginning. My relative’s place where I stayed in Hyderabad, is around 568 km from my home in Bangalore, so I would need to drive around 1136 kms on a single tank of fuel.
I was planning to do a trip again during the 4th week of March, so I set this goal as part of the trip.
I decided on a few ground rules to achieve this, many of which are pretty obvious:
Drive in a relaxed manner with as little accelerator input as possible.
Maintain a speed between 80-105 km/h as much as possible. Only cross these limits if absolutely necessary.
Brake as slowly and as little as possible. I noticed that sudden braking and sudden acceleration are the biggest reasons for low mileage. So planning your braking as much as possible is an easy way to increase the mileage.
Reduce the number of starts and stops of the engine. We decided to have a maximum of 3 breaks in between (Breakfast, Coffee and Lunch).
Start as early as possible, so that we can take advantage of the lesser traffic, as well as the lesser temperatures (which would lead to lower use of the A/C).
Keep the A/C at 23 degrees for the entire trip. No need to sacrifice being comfortable just because I’m on a mileage-maximization drive.
With these rules set, I filled up my car on the night of the 22nd and we planned to start early on the 23rd of March. Unfortunately, I had to violate Rule Number 5, right at the beginning of the trip. Our son was running a fever for the past few days and we had hoped that it was behind him. But on the morning of the trip, I woke up early at 4:30 AM and got ready, but the kid had a fever. So we thought that we may have to cancel the trip. But in a few hours, he seemed to be ok, so we decided to go ahead with the trip.
Unfortunately, this meant that instead of starting at around 5:30 am, we started at 8:40 am and it was already pretty hot by that time. So the fuel consumption would be a little more than I had planned for. Since we had started late, we didn’t have to stop for Breakfast, which reduced our number of stops to just 2.
I maintained a constant speed of around 90-100 km/h for most of the trip and there was very little traffic, so we made good progress. We reached our destination in Hyderabad by around 5:55 PM.
This was the summary of our onward trip:
It took a total of 9 hours 16 minutes (including 2 breaks totalling 1hr 07 minutes). At the end of the trip, the dashboard showed an available range of around 610 kms. I was happy since I only need to cover another 568 kms on the way back.
Unfortunately, as they say, even the best-laid plans can go awry, and in my case, they did. My original plan was to keep the car idle till our return trip, in order to save fuel. Unfortunately, we had to go to another place, which was around 31 kms on the other side of Hyderabad. So this added around 62 km to our original plan. So now, I had to be extra careful on our return trip.
On the day of our return, we started at around 6:00 AM from the other side of Hyderabad and reached home by around 4:50 PM (including 3 planned breaks totalling 1 hr 44 min). I stopped for refuelling at KR Puram, which was 25 kms from my home and the dashboard still showed around 40 km of range left. I could probably have reached home without refuelling, but I didn’t want to risk getting stuck in the unpredictable Bangalore traffic, with no fuel.
The conditions were also not very favourable, since it was pretty hot during the day, and the A/C had to work on overdrive to keep the car cool at 23 degrees. In spite of this, the car completed the trip without refuelling till almost the end, for a total of 1198 kms ( 1178 kms from the fuel pump to the fuel pump). I think I can call this experiment a success, considering all the parameters. In more favourable conditions during cooler temperatures, I think this can be done quite easily.
A summary of the return trip:
Details of the total Trip:
- Car: Skoda Rapid DSG (Oct 2017)
- Total Distance Covered: 1198 Kms (1175 between refuelling)
- Total Driving time: 17 Hrs 20 min (19 Hrs 58 Min including breaks)
- Cost of Fuel: Rs. 4530/- (Approx)
- Number of Passengers: 3
- Breaks: Coffee Day (Gooty), Hangouts (Kurnool), Birbal Darbar (Kodathi Gate)
Keyword: Drove 1200 km on a single tank of fuel in my 2017 Rapid DSG: Here's how