Good Morning/Afternoon/Night my fellow BMW siblings.
Hope everyone is having a good day/evening/night
The topic i have today, is the X1's gas mileage.
According to the EPA, the S-Drive 28 model is rated at 23 city and 34 highway.
I believe the X-Drive model loses 1 MPG on both, not much of a sacrifice for AWD.
For the past 5 months that i have owned my X1, i have noticed that my average MPG is around 20 MPG, with 90% of it being stop and go city traffic.
I recently took a trip to see my brother in San Diego. I was driving around 70 MPH and i had no traffic what so ever. i was mainly driving in ECO PRO and watching those "Extended Range" miles just rack on up.
Upon returning back to L.A., i had racked up 50 miles of extended range and i was in the MPG range of 24.5 miles to the gallon. Rather disappointing, considering the X1 is rated to achieve up to 34 on the highway.
i would say that 95% of the time i am always driving in ECO PRO mode, even in the city. I would get as much as 11-14 Miles of extended range when i would drive in the ECO PRO mode. Problem started to arise when I started to not like the feeling of the car struggling to get up to speed, mainly because of throttle response to be similar to a Prius. (No offense to Prius owners out there)
Anyway, upon further inspection i started driving in the normal mode, and soon came to realize that my car is getting much better MPG than in ECO PRO mode
I think i stumbled upon a post on this forum, and someone said that it is better to drive the car in normal and get up to speed, then making the car struggle to get up to speed due to the lack of response of the throttle.
Typically in cities, the average speed limit is usually between 30-40 MPH. I noticed that once i get up to speed, much faster due to more response, the needle that displays my instantaneous MPG, now typically stays between the upper 50's and the 30's, when i am casually driving and or coasting. I like to assume that if you keep that needle out of the 20 range, than your average MPG would go up, and sure enough, i was correct
So i went from 20.3 MPG to a now whopping 22.3 miles to the gallon, and let me remind you that I drive in a lot of stop and go city traffic with auto start/stop enabled.
Thus i have proven, at least for my X1, that normal mode is better for city driving, in both performance and MPG. ECO PRO is better suited for freeway driving, as proven when i drove to San Diego and i got 50 Miles of Extended Range.
I would like to hear if anyone else has played around with the X1's driving dynamics and what MPG do they get?
The reason i am sharing this article is to see if anyone else can relate when driving in ECO PRO vs. normal. I know that there are some MPG forums out there, but I am just curious to see what other people experiences are.
Thanks for reading
BTW, my car's name is Elliot, so if by chance you are wondering who Elliot is? It's my X1 HAHA