Nick,
How many km's are on the vehicle?

Fuel consumption should improve as you break everything in. I know some manuals for other vehicles say not to check fuel mileage until after the first oil change.

My 2009 XLS with the V6 gets around 11 L/100kms combined.
You'll see tank by tank fuel consumption go up as the temperatures fall into winter - and in my case winter tires go on.

 

Nick's GT has slightly above 1000km.

 

Thanks for your post Nesser. I didn’t know this fact. I thought that nowadays they break-in the engines on the production line by running them for X many hours. The manual only mentioned 500km break-in period.

I may have found the person with the lead right foot that drives my car. It is Mr. Adaptive Cruise Control. :-) I’ve been playing with it quite a bit in the city, during the first month of owning the car. It is a useful system, but it can, obviously, only see just the car ahead (around at most 150m (164 yards)) and cannot anticipate like humans do. It does not know about the traffic lights conditions, stopped traffic ahead. When someone decides to turn right into their driveway we normally anticipate that by the time the car gets there the path will already be cleared. Mr. Adaptive Cruise Control just breaks. When the car in front changes lanes and moves out of the way Mr. Adaptive Cruise Control does what it is supposed to do. Accelerates to set speed. I mean it steps on the pedal, not just lightly touches it, sometimes even changes gears, even though the speed might be just 15-20km/s under the target. When the car in front moves into turn-left-only lane and brakes, the system, quite frequently, brakes too and then, once you get closer, slams on the gas to get to set speed. Not very fuel efficient driving I might say…

What I found so far is that the only way to achieve fuel consumption numbers is to be very, I mean very, light on the gas pedal. Then the numbers are better, closer to the advertised. I’ve done trips now in the city, late in the evenings, with light traffic and I typically see around 11.2-11.6 l/100km (21mpg).
In heavier traffic, with lots of traffic lights on the way and no highway driving the numbers are the same as before 13.3-13.5 l/100km ( 17.5 mpg). I also did a longer trip which was 90% highway around 300km (187 miles) (@ 115kmh (71.5mph) and the average for the trip was 9.1 l/100km (25.85 mpg)

There is one fuel saving feature of the car “Idle Neutral Logic” that I am still not sure about. I cannot figure out if it works properly or not. They mention in their PR documents that they improved it from previous design and it switches transmission into drive a lot faster when you move your foot off the brake pedal. I don’t feel it switching into Neutral at all. I let go off the brake a little, not even fully, the car starts moving right away. I even did an experiment where I held the brake pedal with my left foot and touched the accelerator lightly. The car clearly wanted to move. It was not in neutral for sure.

Nick

 

As for idle neutral it is not really a transmission switching D-N-D. Instead it kinda disengages torque converter.

 

On the road, in our new-to-us '10 LS, we've seen between 9l and 10l / 100km, going at 107km/h on the highway, with an average in the mid-90's. That's with 2 adults, 2 kids and 2 large dogs with a box on the roof. That's usually with cruise-control engaged with a steady flow of traffic.

In the city, we've found that you have to drive quite a while before the average approaches realistic numbers. In our case, usually around 13-14 l/100km, if we manage to drive around long enough. Otherwise, it claims in the 20s, steadily going down as time goes on.

Coming from a Fit, I'm utterly shocked at the numbers, but with a third kid on the way, it makes sense in ways not related to fuel consumption

Looking forward to winter in a high AWD vehicle, never had problems with the econobox, but it might even be fun now. If only I could find winter wheels as easily as remembering fuel consumption...