Chevy's Cruze diesel is one of the more significant cars arriving this year.
It's not just economical by Chevy's own standards, but at 46 mpg highway it comfortably takes the fight to the class-leading Volkswagen Jetta TDI too,
With a 15.6 gallon gas tank, that 46 mpg should be enough to get you over 700 miles at highway speeds--717, to be precise. But one GM engineer has gone even better, with an astonishing 900 miles on a tank.
Reversing the math, that works out at just shy of 58 mpg, if she ran the tank dry--so potentially a little more.
How on earth do you get that from a Cruze Diesel? According to Tessa Baughman, the energy engineer in question, it simply involved traveling at 5 under the speed limit on a family visit to Arkansas.
Even on the return journey, with more traffic, she achieved over 800 miles to a tank - just over 51 mpg.
Now at this point we do have to highlight that the video you see above is a GM promotional video--so there's more than an element of "well, they would say that" about it. The Cruze's official EPA figures are a more modest 46 mpg highway and 27 city, for a combined rating of just 33 mpg.
But you only need look at the EPA's fueleconomy.gov site or sites like Fuelly to see that it isn't unusual to see diesels comfortably exceeding their EPA ratings.
Not everyone will get nearly 60 mpg from their Chevy Cruze diesel--in fact, it's likely that very few owners will.
But drive like a GM energy engineer and there's every chance you'll get that figure on some journeys, at least.
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