2017 Chevrolet Cruze Diesel: fuel economy review for automatic, manual versions

The automatic easily beat EPA, but I think they had too much fun with the manual for a fair assessment of its fuel economy.

 

Truecar shows a price of around $17k for a diesel Cruze with a manual transmission in the LA area, unfortunately not available in the hatchback. Fuelly shows an average of 49 mpg for the '17 Cruze diesel. It might be a fun commuter when I turn in my TDI, that's seriously cheap. I think I'll ask for one the next time I rent a car, and see if I like the platform.

 

Ill keep my TDI for now. Its only got 330,000 on it.
Odd to me that the Cruze gets roughly the same that TDI owners were saying they got, but no EPA stuff about them, just VW.

Now, if anything happens to my wifes Prius, I might have her look at a Cruze, because there really isnt another option for a diesel car anymore. I just wonder if they will last as long as the VWs do.

 

Any reasonable driver should be able to beat the EPA ratings, and those TDI drivers were doing even better because the cars were cheating.

What is odd about a newer design achieving those numbers as actual EPA ratings, likely allowing drivers to achieve better still?

Do you have reason to believe that these latest designs are cheating too?

 

I know that about the EPA ratings.
What Im saying is that the mileage ratings and what is being reported by drivers seems to be awful similar between the two vehicles of similar size and weight.
Odd in that a company with almost no experience in small displacement diesel engines comes out with this about the same time as the VW issues began (the diesel Cruze was announced long), VW being a company whos done little diesels for more than 30 years.
Odd that from a VW owners standpoint, 50 mpg is 50 mpg, and from the discussions going on on the TDI forums at the time, something seemed awful fishy about what happened to VW.
Odd that the EPA went with real world testing vs what they had, while the old numbers were constantly hard to achieve, or so they said even though several vehicles Ive had exceed those numbers, including my 02 TDI, and that the new numbers were supposed to be more accurate, but are still being exceeded with regularity.
Odd that my 02 TDI is well before any of the so called "cheating", yet still gets 48-50mpg on the highway, but the later version couldnt without cheating.
Odd in a whole lot of ways if I think about it too much, which Im not going to do.

The fact is now, GM makes a diesel and that VW no longer does in the US. Im disappointed that VW wouldnt continue with diesels here, as I think they are leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else in that area, but I hope the Cruze a great car and leads to more small diesel cars.
But so far, nobody knows how long they will last. I hope they are on par with VWs engines, but we wont know for quite a while.
Diesels are better in the long run than most people give them credit for, and I hope it leads to more options in the small diesel truck market
or better yet, a diesel mini-van.

Hopefully thats explanation enough for what was meant to be a simple statement.

 

The engine in the first Cruze diesels was a VM Motori design. I wouldn't be surprised if the new one is too.
VM Motori - Wikipedia

 

Doesn't your 02 predate the tighter emission requirements that spurred the cheating? Thus, it can spew the same leval of pollutants (and get the same mpg) without being labeled a cheater?

Not necessarily odd, just grandfathered in under older rules specific to its time, just as gassers of the same era don't have to meet the tighter regulations of today. Honda lean burn gas engines also got great mpg, but later ran into difficulty with tightening limits on the same NOx emissions.

 

The cheating TDIs started in the USA with the common rail engines that came out for 2009. I had one and the main reasons I got rid of it were because metal particles were showing up in the fuel filter, the intercooler hoses were filling up with goop and the DSG trans was banging away.