Running Great

Had the 116 ED for a few weeks now and took it for a run to Telford 100 miles away, it just breezed there, almost felt like I'd only done 30 miles.

So I took it to the East coast a return trip of 196 miles, its a combination of many twists and turns, almost constant gear changes etc.

The Avensis would have used about 3/4 of it's tank on this run, the Insignia 1.6 SRI used almost an entire tank (about 8 gallons) so nearly £50 of fuel with the best I had being 21mpg, the Avensis climbed a little on it's run to almost 40mpg but both were very costly to pop to the beach and back.
The Passatt would have returned almost identical to the Avensis so they were about £35 in fuel (About 6 gallons I think)

The BMW did it in 1/4 of a tank of fuel, lets say it did it the trip on 4 gallons and the computer was  advising me it still had over 300 miles left, almost enough to go there and back twice more.

This is pretty amazing considering the stop/start, accelerate/brake and challenge the journey gives, MPG suffered due to this, returning just over 51mpg but when your comparing it to the previous cars it's easy to see the clear winner.

The country roads didn't represent much of a challenge, in fact you could get to cruising speed very quickly with little effort compared to previous cars and the road holding showed itself in that you could go around corners at previously untried speeds.

So far it's great, I'm getting about 3 weeks out of a tank running to and from work instead of 2 weeks, even now after coming back from the beach I've pottered around for 4 days and it still says 300 miles left so it's returning economy and performance where normally you get one or the other.

The Insignia for example was badly under powered with it's 1.6 petrol engine, you had to rev rev rev to get anything out of it, a burst of activity at the top end then a gear change and drive it hard to get any speed.

With the twin turbo in this engine you get your Diesel torque and turbo push early, then as that one starts to fade in comes the big boy and you get lively and demanding acceleration, it's almost constant from start to red line.

With almost 3k on the clock now and 15k until service due it will be interesting how it goes over the coming months.