Peugeot 208 world record

[RetroPug]

You mean old inefficient cars Dum....there are plenty of modern fast cars that are also reasonably economical.

We'll see when people buy them 208s I guess, I will be very surprised if they get much above 70mpg in the real world...

Still not economical enough for you toms! 

Nothing ever will be.

Seems like a pointless test tbh, I bet it doesn't top 70mpg tank average in real world driving.

Another point actually, name another possible test that would actually make it possible to make objective comparisons? As in, a test that a manufacturer could carry out to see how their powertrain is performing. Simply getting a large number of people to "just drive the car" doesn't give you correlated nor consistent results.

Why not?  Given a large enough group and several tanks of fuel it would work well.  I bet if we did a poll on here of daily driver HDi's like that most would be 50-55mpg.  Maybe ~10% with a lead foot and town driving would be below, maybe ~10% would be above.  That's a much more useful test imo, even if it is a slightly less accurate.

MPG doesn't vary as much as people say, I haven't got above 50mph so far on this tank, used about half in over a month and am no better off than when I was doing loads of miles at 80mph because it's still well mixed...  The only thing that I can see making a difference is people that do a massive commute say once a month and then solely town the rest of the time.  My mixed has been the same over the tank give or take 1mpg for 6 months now...

Because if you did the same test in Sheffield, the same test in London and the same test in cornwall you'd get vastly different results due to different mixes of driving, different hills, etc. etc. You'd get different results depending on the season.

If you did that test, then changed something on the ECU or something else and then tested again, you wouldn't know whether the variance in MPG was due to your change on the vehicle or the fact that the test was 3 weeks later and the weather was different and you used a different group of drivers and it was a different batch of fuel from the refinery (all of which do make a difference).

Using professional drivers giving the exact same inputs to the car using the same batch of fuel under the same environmental conditions is pretty much the only way to get useful results (useful for the manufacturer), and even then it is still very difficult to get good, comparable results. As a marketing tool it is better to quote higher figures as well.

I'm not disagreeing with you entirely, if I bought a new car I'd love to have overall statistics from a large sample size of 'normal' drivers. It would be great information for the consumer. I'm just saying that the results of such tests, which would be very expensive to carry out, are not useful to a manufacturer in my opinion, which is why they don't really do them as far as I know. I work in vehicle testing.