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Weekend Drives: Audi Q2 1.0 TFSI - How fuel efficient is it?

By Kenny Yeo - on 11 Dec 2017, 3:28pm

It is begging to be nicknamed "Winnie the Pooh".

To meet stricter emission standards, car manufacturers have been downsizing engines for the past couple of years. But smaller engines typically mean less power, so to make up for the lost in displacement, they have turned to turbocharging.

Audi’s relatively new 1.0-liter TFSI is a good example. It has 3 cylinders and displaces just 999cc. It sounds small, but thanks to a turbo, it puts out 116hp and 200nm of torque. That might not sound like a lot, but its torque output is actually greater than most 2-liter naturally aspirated units. It feels sprightly in real life too.

But is it actually any more fuel efficient? To find out, I took it and drove around for as much as I could over the weekend.

Audi’s fuel efficiency claims are as follows: 19.2km/l or 5.2l/100km.

Not fantastic returns, I'm afraid.

I recorded 270.8km of driving and managed to achieve 15km/l. That’s nowhere near Audi’s claims. But more worryingly, it is also no better than what most 1.6-liter naturally aspirated cars can manage, which is typically around 12kml to 16km/l.

Still, this is understandable given our mostly stop-start traffic and the fact that the Q2’s 1.0-liter engine offers performance that easily matches or outpaces most 1.6-liter naturally aspirated cars. It also doesn’t help that I have a heavy right foot.

It might be tiny but it offers quite a lot of performance. Consequently, it consumes fuel more than what I was expecting.

But if you are driving mostly on the expressway and if you have a light foot, you can achieve far better numbers. On a short mostly highway drive over 30km, I managed a personal best of 18km/l. This is closer to the manufacturer’s claim, and given the Q2’s 50-liter capacity tank means a range of about 900km on a single fill.

But where fuel efficiency is concerned, the Q2 and its compact 1.0-liter engine is beat by the Hyundai Ioniq, which is powered by a 1.6-liter naturally aspirated petrol engine and an electric motor. When I drove the Ioniq earlier this year, I managed 19.7km/l, which, to be fair, is also far off from Hyundai's official claim of 25.6km/l.

Nevertheless, if fuel efficiency is your greatest priority, you might want to take a look at hybrids.

Kenny Yeo

Kenny Yeo / Associate Editor

Specifications are not everything. It's what you do with what you have that matters.

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