Daft advert claims - debunk time !

Just caught an ad for energy saving tyres that promised to save 80 litres of fuel over the life of the car.

Sounds ok - What's that mean exactly though ?

My Focus does between 28 and 36 miles to the Imperial Gallon. Call it 32. That's 7 miles per litre. (7.04 - close enough). So over the life of the tyre, which I'd expect to be 20,000 miles on the fronts, that's an extra 560 miles.

The 20,000 miles should take 2857 litres of fuel, with the oh-so-green energy saving tyres it'll take 2777. Petrol here costs about 133.9p/litre, so those 80 litres saved works out to about £107. I'll do those 20,000 miles over just under 3 year so that's a saving of £36 per year.

That's kinda - meh. And it's even worse with the rear tyres as they did 40,000 miles.

Mind you, I paid £80 per corner on my last set of tyres, so that £107 saved actually means Free Tyres ! Probably at the cost of having less grip around corners though, like my current pair of Famous Brand (not saying who - ads = bad) tyres on the back of the Focus.

With the next car it's better, because it's expected to do double the economy. 68mpg instead of 32. Not looked at the Next Car yet, although it's just the other side of Bristol. Friday pm is looking like a good opportunity to go peek, plus I'm having a sense of looking to out cagey the apparently cagey garages. I'm feeling a bit like Truck Roadkill at the moment, so I'm shepherding my energy carefully at the mo with just crashing out in the evenings. Gaming is really suffering to the point where it goes several days between putting the pooter in Game Mode.

Saying that though, Otis Cookies from the canteen were Awesome earlier. It even resulted in one of those Crazy Just Bounced Off Wall Emails to the long-suffering Mrs Sunshine.

I guess the lesson which I just distracted myself from is : Don't trust adverts. When they make a claim that sounds believable, see if you can work out what it actually means and from there, whether the claim is actually relevant to you.