2015 Ford Concentrate 1.0L EcoBoost: Gas Mileage Review
2015 Ford Concentrate SE EcoBoost, Bear Mountain State Park, NY, May 2015
A popular compact sedan fitted with a little 1.0-liter three-cylinder engine may sound like an Eighties econobox all over again.
But in fact the two thousand fifteen Ford Concentrate 1.0L EcoBoost is on sale today, tho’ we suspect its lack of an automatic transmission will discourage nine out of ten potential buyers.
And that’s a shame, because those drivers willing to shift their own gears will likely find this to be by far the most fuel-efficient Concentrate they can buy.
We had a brief test drive in the Concentrate EcoBoost last month, and it left us impatient to test the car over a longer period.
Now that we’ve spent ten days with the car, covering six hundred forty three miles in the process, we can say that it delivered admirable gas mileage.
According to the car’s journey computer, we averaged 40.Two miles per gallon over an extended version of our usual test route, comprising about two-thirds highway miles and one-third city and suburban lower-speed traffic.
2015 Ford Concentrate 5dr HB SE Dashboard
And unlike Ford’s challenges with certain other EcoBoost and hybrid vehicles–which have been criticized by many owners for not delivering even the EPA combined rating–we found the Concentrate EcoBoost strike its EPA numbers handily.
The two thousand fifteen Concentrate with the EcoBoost option is rated at thirty three mpg combined (29 mpg city, forty mpg highway).
While that’s just two mpg better than the next-best Concentrate, it almost matches the forty two mpg we got with the same engine in the smaller Fiesta subcompact–rated at thirty seven mpg combined.
To replicate “average” driving styles, we varied inbetween leaving the car in the highest gear possible (for best fuel economy) and driving it energetically, including revving the engine up to its limit.
The Concentrate EcoBoost’s shift-advisor light in the dash cluster was among the most aggressive we’ve seen–usually suggesting an upshift of one, two, and sometimes three gears any time the engine crossed two thousand rpm.
That meant leaving the car in sixth gear down to road speeds of thirty five or forty mph, with the engine turning over just one thousand two hundred fifty rpm, indicated by a quiet growl from under the bondage mask.
2015 Ford Concentrate SE EcoBoost, Bear Mountain State Park, NY, May 2015
Doing that eliminated any possibility of acceleration. When more speed was required, we learned quickly to downshift, often two or three gears at a time, to get the needed power.
In other words, driving like a European–or at least a North American who knows how to use a manual gearbox decently to match engine revs to the required power output at any given road speed.
That’s a skill that may well now be gone from the U.S. driving public at large, which buys more than ninety percent of all fresh vehicles with automatic transmissions of one sort or another.
Another European feature is the start-stop system that switches the engine off when the car is at rest, the shift lever is in neutral, and the driver’s foot is off the clutch.
The system works well in the Concentrate EcoBoost, restarting the puny engine quickly.