Fuel Efficiency

Let's set the context, before I give the final average. We had a fully loaded swift - 5 adults with 8 baggages - a sight that would give the engineer responsible for design and calculation of car's ground clearance nightmares! The car was atleast 300-400 kgs more in weight than a typical highway drive car.

Further, we went through very different types of roads and terrains. We did the Himalayas for 3 days, we did travel on not so great roads, we did a lot of travel where one had to break and accelerate in cycles and yes, we did have lady luck shining for us on the golden quadrilaterals and the empty top quality highways of Rajasthan - in short, it was indeed a good mixture of highway driving conditions.

Further, the A/C was operational for the entire journey.

The car gave a total fuel average of 13.6 kms / litre of fuel. This is a 2006 model Petrol Swift, which means that it does not have the advantage of the new more efficient K series engines. So, overall we were satisfied with the fuel efficiency. On Golden Quadrilateral, the efficiency jumped to around 15 and sometimes 16 km/ litre. On the hills we got between 10.3-12.5 kms/litre and 11-12 on bad/ congested roads per se.

Here is the list of our fuel refills and fuel efficiency for each refill. There is always a bit of error involved to the extent the tank is filled, I would estimate that all these figures are probably accurate to +/- 0.5 kms/ litre, or in other words +/- 1 litre of fuel filled.

In my initial trip budgeting, I had assumed an average of 12.5 kms/ litre - in the end, I should be more than happy with 13.6 kms/ litre.

10,066 kms in all!

In 18 days, we covered 10,066 kms in all. Unfortunately, I only have documentary evidence for 99.3% of this journey, the other 0.7% was lost due to the fact that the Swift Trip Odometer resets to 0 after 9999.9 kms. Fortunately for us, I had half guessed it and just before Chennai, I took a picture of this magical number - 9999.9 kms - for some reason, it looks a lot more than 10,066 kms :-)

Exploring Indian Roads - from potholes to expressways!

While I was planning for this trip, the easy and tempting bit was to do a full round of the Golden Quadrilateral. That would have let my odometer run close to 7000 kms or so, without really being too tiring. However, given that GQ only comes till Chennai in South, it clearly wouldn't have defined the periphery of India.

Here are below some stats from the trip. Overall, we travelled 2% of our distance on expressways (Pune-Mumbai) and (Ahmedabad-Baroda). Clearly, expressways in India are being developed and in two years time, significant portion of Golden Quadrilateral, esp. near the metros would be 6-laned and could then probably qualify as expressways.

Fortunately for us, we covered 47% of our distance on Golden Quadrilateral that was ready and some part of East-West and North-South Corridor that were ready too. Clearly, traveling on good quality roads helps a lot to boost up average speed and lowers fuel consumption. As a very rough estimate, we would have probably covered 70-75% of the Golden Quadrilateral. The parts that we didn't were Chennai-Bangalore-Tumukur and the long stretch from Baroda to Delhi.

Another 19% of our jounrey was on good national highways and a couple of very good state highways where one could clock good speeds and were not too congested. These were fantastic roads and at most places on par with the travel experience on GQ.

A significant 20% of our journey was on not really great National Highways or bad state highways. I am also including congested highways under this bracket - the end result of this was that the drives took a lot longer than I had initially expected and we probably drove at an average of 40-45kmph on these roads. Not a great place to be if you are any bit emotionally attached to the tyres, underbody, gear box and mud flaps of your car! :-) The roads that are largely part of this category are:

• Trichy-Rameswaram, Rameswaram-Madurai
• Kanyakumari - Trivandrum - Ernakulam - Palghat (entire Kerala was like a continous city - this state requires massive investments in highways to grow its economy)
• Palghat - Coimbotore- Tumukur - again a relatively poor road, though it wasn't too congested beyond Coimbotore.
• Jamnagar-Morbi - roads in and out of Jamnagar were very bad in deed - it was a rough ride even for a truck going at 10 kmph, i had to sway around the entire width of the road to find spots where the ground clearnace was just right to let my Swift go through
• Sri Ganganagar to Panchkula (congested and speed limiting though the roads were okay
• Panchkula - Ghanauli was very bad, esp. on NH 21A - in between a bridge was broken and we had to take a detour to get back to NH21 from NH21A
• 35 kms either side of Allahabad - we had to get off Golden Quadrilateral and come in to Allahabad for our night halt. There were a couple of very difficult stretches (more details in a separate post)
• Bhuvaneshwar - Puri was congested and narrow for the traffic on this route. Puri to Chilika was a very narrow road, definitely shouldn't be termed as a national highway

Another 6% of our trip was on hilly terrain, most of it to and from Manali. This did have an impact on the overall average speed.

4% of our trip was on GQ that was still getting ready or parts that were being upgraded to 6-lanes. It resulted in relatively slower progress, particularly along the places where a flyover was being constructed.

Finally, we spent 2% of our trip in cities - we tried our level best to avoid cities and were lucky at most times to find a good bye-pass, but at some places, it was just a must to go through the city.

Here are the breakdown of the trip by the types of roads for each day of our travel. A note of caution - these are approximate estimates based on the maps and our experience, the only exact number being the distance that we travelled each day. In any case, that shouldn't matter - it should still give you a decent sense of the mix of roads.

Daily average driving speed - interesting to see the variation!

Typically, when I drive Singapore-KL on the expressway, I get an average of around 100-110 kmph for the expressway part of the drive, while I drive at a steady 110-120 kmph for most of it. Thus, on a good expressway, the average is typically 10-20 kmph lower than the the speed we usually drive at - thanks to slowing down in between to allow slower trucks to overtake each other and driving through certain bottlenecks.

For our overall trip, we got a pur driving average speed of 58kmph, which excludes time spent on sight-seeing, food and petrol breaks, but does include traffic jams, city traffic and slower drive through hills and lesser roads. Clearly, given that it is so heavily dependent on the kind of road we got, it varied a lot from one day to the other. Here is the average driving speed that we experienced on a daily basis:

It did vary a lot, from a low of 33kmph in hills (Manali-Bilaspur) to a high of 82kmph in Rajasthan from Jaisalmer to Sri Ganganagar. Interestingly, the highest average speed was not in the golden quadrilateral, but along a great national highway all along the border with Pakistan which in some ways does explain the great average we got. This highway has very little traffic as it passes through the lesser habituated regions of Rajasthan. Further, given its proximity to the border, it is a strategic route for the army and therefore the highway is very well maintained. I clocked a constant 100-110kmph on this highway. The average speed could have been more if we had not seen around 200k-300k people walk for a religious meeting somewhere in Rajasthan (more on this in the daily blog section).

I will explain the rest of the driving routes in greater detail in another post that would summarize the roads we faced over the 18 day drive.

Daily distance travelled

Here is our overall travel distances every day. The highest being 877 kms on the final day and the lowest being 177 kms from Manali to Bilaspur on hilly terrain which wa done in about half a day.

Day #	Date	Start	Night Stop	Trip odometer	Day distance	Places of interest
				-
1	3-Sep-10	Chennai	Madurai	751	751	Rameswaram
2	4-Sep-10	Madurai	Palghat	1,408	657	Kanyakumari
3	5-Sep-10	Palghat	Devnagari	2,017	609
4	6-Sep-10	Devnagari	Thane	2,728	711
5	7-Sep-10	Thane	Jamnagar	3,564	836
6	8-Sep-10	Jamnagar	Morbi	3,969	405	Dwaraka
7	9-Sep-10	Morbi	Jaisalmer	4,648	679	Sand dunes
8	10-Sep-10	Jaisalmer	Sri GangaNagar	5,260	612	Sand dunes
9	11-Sep-10	Sri GangaNagar	Panchkula	5,593	333
10	12-Sep-10	Panchkula	Manali	5,924	331	Manali
11	13-Sep-10	Manali	Bilaspur	6,101	177	Manali
12	14-Sep-10	Bilaspur	Mathura	6,638	538	Vrindavan
13	15-Sep-10	Mathura	Allahabad	7,172	534	Taj Mahal
14	16-Sep-10	Allahabad	Dhanbad	7,710	538
15	17-Sep-10	Dhanbad	Bhubaneshwar	8,408	698
16	18-Sep-10	Bhubaneshwar	Bhubaneshwar	8,622	215	Puri, Chilika
17	19-Sep-10	Bhubaneshwar	Vishakapatnam	9,189	567	Konark
18	20-Sep-10	Vishakapatnam	Chennai	10,067	877

Further analysis on our travel times and average speed in the next post!