Nov 5, 2008

Audi Completes Diesel Mileage Marathon

Actress Brooke Burke and television personality Mario Lopez helped celebrate the closing ceremony of the Audi Mileage Marathon and congratulated drivers as they concluded the cross-country trek. Nearly two dozen clean diesel vehicles made their way up hill and down dale in a coast-to-coast rally that gave many Americans their first glimpse of landmark TDI technology.

With the streets and highways of America as its driving course, Audi proved clean-diesel passes the real-world test. Completing the cross-country Mileage Marathon, Audi’s TDI fleet not only redefined diesel as an ultralow emission alternative to gas-powered vehicles but also posted noteworthy fuel efficiency numbers. Covering over 4800 miles from New York to Santa Monica (Los Angeles), the Audi A3 TDI averaged 45 miles per gallon, the Audi A4 vehicles averaged 36 mpg over the drive and the Audi Q5 TDI vehicles averaged 32 mpg. Even the Audi Q7 TDI vehicles, clean-diesel SUVs that will be the first TDI vehicles available in the Unites States early next year, averaged an excellent 28 mpg over the entire drive.

From the start of the event in New York, 184 drivers from 15 countries took the wheel in the cars as they completed the total distance of 4,887 miles in 13 daily stages. The actual driving time for all these vehicles to complete the route averaged 93 hours. The route was a “realistic” combination of typical road and traffic situations. Long sections of highway alternated with stages on regular out-of-town roads. Stop-and-go driving in major cities was included as well as lengthy uphill and downhill gradients, for instance, over 10,826-foot Rocky Mountain passes and in the Sierra Nevada. As the route shows, the Mileage Marathon was not conceived as an extreme economy run but as a practical test closely related to typical day-to-day conditions.