Australian couple trying for 2,000 miles on one tank in Chevy Cruze Eco

With a featherweight foot and good hypermiling technique, you may be able to milk a Hyundai Sonata Hybrid for 1,000 miles on one tank. You might also squeeze 1,200 miles from a single fill-up on a Toyota Prius. And you may be able to get over 1,400 miles out of one tank of gas on a Ford Fusion hybrid. This begs the question: can you really get 2,000 miles from a single tank in an ordinary, stock, inexpensive, non-hybrid Chevy Cruze Eco?

That's what John and Helen Taylor of Melbourne, Australia are about to try, and while we may all be used to teams pulsing and gliding their way around slick, flat tracks to generate impressive mileage figures, the Taylor's are are taking a somewhat more difficult course. They're going to drive through the contiguous 48 states.

Two thousand miles won't carry them across the whole course. The Taylors figure their complete summer road trip, which includes at least 15 miles in each state, at around 9,600 miles. However, somewhere in their they're hoping to press the Cruze Eco's 12.6 gallon tank into coughing up more than 2k miles. Which works out to over 158 mpg. Which sounds more than a little impossible.

However, if there's any team that knows how to get every last drop of petrol from a vehicle, it's the Taylors. They've already pushed a Peugeot 308 to an average of 75 mpg in a trip across Australia, and that's just one of 88 world records they hold for saving gas. Also, a look at the details of the trip suggests that the Taylors may be doing some picking and choosing in determining which miles count toward the 2k tank.

We'll soon know if they succeed in this monumental task. Their gas tank was sealed at a gas station outside Burbank on August 1, and somewhere out there at this moment, the Taylors are rolling up the miles.

[Source: Road & Track]