Appendix 3 Motoring summary

I will cover two points in this post: distance covered per day and fuel consumption by fill up.

Distance per day.

The chart below is based on distances I recorded each evening, and comes up with a somewhat different total to the difference in odometer readings from starting out to returning home.  I can't explain this, but as no-one is going to die as a result of the confusion I have decided to ignore it.

The average distance covered per day works out to 179km.  One of my objectives was to avoid mega distances in a day so it was pleasing that the most we did in a day was 450km. On 5 days we did less than 50km.

Fuel consumption 

Overall we achieved 11.56 l/100km - or in old money 24.2mpg.  This varied quite a bit between fill-ups!

Causes of the variation can include:

• whether towing the camper or not;
• road surfaces (the major highways have much lower rolling-resistance bitumen than 'ordinary' country roads);
• terrain (the flat country out West uses far less fuel per distance than the hilly and twisty country in the ranges of New England);
• the click-off settings at a bowser (ie one bowser doesn't completely fill the tank whereas the next one does, giving an exceptionally high fuel consumption at the second fill up); and
• headwinds.