Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

Or any other you want to make.

4x4s are heavy and have much more friction in their drive train. Which
makes a big difference to their town fuel consumption. And the poor
aerodynamics make them use more fuel at speed.
Sorry Dave, but if you're going to get all accurate and
use facts, then you probably won't get an answer.

I can certainly confirm that a defender - same basic chassis and
transmission as a disco, but much less fancy, returns between 20 and
25mpg overall on normal driving (cruise at 45-50 on open roads you get
25mpg, in town or at 85mph, its nearer 20mpg.

The same is totally *not* true of other more 'townified' 4x4's..here the
fuel consumption is very close to that of a standard road car. However
they don't have the ground clearance to wade through floods and deep
snow, and the sheer grunt of the landrover..

I am totally against raising car tax on 4x4's though. By all means raise
the fuel tax, and let people decide what they want to drive...but this
road tax does not encourage low fuel consumption. It encourages non
4x4's. That is not the same thing at all. With a fixed motoring budget
one is tempted to go for a small car and spend less on tax, and MORE on
fuel, and do MORE miles.

We don't quite HAVE to have a defender, but its such a capable tackle
anything sort of car, and it does get to go off road quite a bit, for
all sorts of reasons..that I prefer to keep it and simply use it
infrequently when I need to. Currently tax, insurance and MOT together
exceed the cost of the fuel that it uses...