The Vehicles Earth

By the CAR road test team
Long Term Tests


Enjoying the 500-mile range of the i40
It's all in the mind of course, but there is something satisfying about a range of over 500 miles. Makes you feel like you're getting value for money. It's all in the mind because in order to see that figure on the trip, you've got to brim the Hyundai's 15-gallon/70-litre tank, and at around 149p a litre that's £100 worth of diesel.

So you have to pay for that minor pleasure. I could push it even higher though – Hyundai claims a combined fuel figure of 62.8mpg for the i40, and I'm hovering at just 39mpg, mostly because of my stop start commute and partly because I like driving fast. If I 'hypermile', and touch the throttle like it's a bed of hotcoals and I'm barefoot, it's pretty easy to get 42 or 45mpg, briefly – though that's hard to sustain because I'm always in such a rush. Imagine if I got it up to 60mpg – I'd see a 925 mile range on the trip.

Of course, the other disadvantage our i40 has in trying to achieve its official fuel economy figures is its perpetual payload. The i40's interior is enormous and – either by coincidence or perhaps just through opportunism – it's usually carrying something heavy.

Last week I helped a friend move out a few boxes of books. We folded the i40's rear seats down, and discovered the rear bench doesn't fold forwards to give you a flat floor – instead, the rear seat backs simply drop onto the bench, giving you a floor that gently slopes upwards towards the dashboard. Still, no matter – it's still a big load area, and by the time we'd loaded up the rear suspension looked under some strain. Poor Hyundai – pulling away from junctions it felt like I was driving a oil tanker. How is it ever going to reach 60mpg when I drive it like this?

By Mark Walton