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Investigation BROQUET Part 3 - Carma Magazine




Suppose you travel an average of 20,000 kilometres per year and your car does a good 10km per litre, then it follows that you consume – which means you pay for - 2000 litres of fuel per year. At the current price of about $1.81 per litre (for 95 octane), your fuel costs for that one car works out to $3620 per annum. This time last year the same fuel cost $1.18 per litre, so you were paying $2360, assuming of course you had the same car. Now, fuel price is not the only variable. Both distance travelled and fuel consumption will obviously affect your annual fuel budget. MPVs and SUVs rarely return 10km per litre because of their relative size and weight, and in the case of SUVs, poor aerodynamics too.

Let us also consider a more realistic mileage that the average Singapore family will cover in a year. The typical daily scenario would be: a morning run to one or more schools (presumably within the neighbourhood), then to one or two offices in the morning; short drive out to lunch; return journey sometimes with a short detour to a school. The family car is also busy during the weekends running for the groceries/shopping and sports/games/tuition. Total mileage is unlikely to be much less than 30,000km. Then, if it is an MPV with a strong appetite for petrol, we are looking at 7.5 to 8km/litre in moderate traffic, although a full sized MPV easily consumes 16 litres per 100 km – that converts to 6.25km/litre – when the trips are frequent and short with plenty of stop-start driving. So let’s look at our arithmetic again with some of the more realistic numbers:

Total distance: 30,000km
Consumption: 7.5km/litre
Price Of Fuel: S$1.81/Litre of 95 octane

Total Fuel Cost = (Total distance x Price/litre) / Consumption
= $7240.00 per year

While we have no control over hurricanes or oil prices, we can reduce expense by cutting down on the number of trips or make improvements in the car’s fuel consumption. Our little exercise of fitting a Broquet B40 and running the 2.4-litre Honda engine over 27,000km has revealed a theoretical saving as follows:

Assuming fuel price at S$1.81/litre,

Pre-Broquet
Test Distance 27,000km
Consumption 6.85km/litre(average)
Fuel Costs S$7134
Post-Broquet
Test Distance 27,000km
Consumption 7.4km/litre
Fuel Costs S$6604

Savings over 27,000 km S$530.00

For more information on Broquet, contact Universal Consultants at Tel: 6743 1166 or visit www.broquet.com.sg
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