Sedans That Get 40 Mpg: Which Is Best?

Sedans That Get 40 Mpg: Which Is Best?, These six automakers each have four-door models with exceptional mileage. Every once in a while, an advertising claim comes along that strikes a nerve. It makes you stop and glance up at the TV screen, or flip back to that previous newspaper page to contemplate its meaning. For me, it’s usually a hair-loss treatment. However, for most people, it’s probably something that impacts their pocket book, and a pretty good example of that in the car business recently has been the claim of “40 mpg!”

It’s a powerful number — 40 mpg. Car engineers do sophisticated analysis to figure out how to reach it, and the numerical game often comes down to just getting to the threshold where the number rounds up to 40.

It just so happens that we’re practiced at rounding up, too — in this instance, rounding up six significant examples of this rarified 40-mpg breed to determine if any of them are also cars you’d be happy to own.

The select six we’ve summoned to our investigation are the Chevrolet Cruze Eco (28/42), Ford Focus SFE (28/40), Honda Civic HF (29/41), Hyundai Elantra (29/40), Mazda3 (28/40), and Volkswagen Jetta TDI (30/42). A diesel, but no hybrids? Unlike the public’s uneasiness with battery-aided driving (hybrid sales have been stuck around the 2.5-percent range), diesels are hydrocarbon kissing-cousins to their gasoline brethren. We know them. We’re comfortable with them. And we were also curious to see how the Jetta TDI stacks-up against its high-tech gasoline alternatives.

In search of 40-mpg answers, we drove from our El Segundo nerve center to the high desert north of Los Angeles and two destinations we normally visit for our Car of the Year programs. At the first, we grunted our way through a zillion mind-numbing laps of the Hyundai-Kia Proving Ground’s 6.4-mile oval in a sequence of stepped, constant speeds to establish our fleet’s steady-state fuel-efficiency.