How we calculate
Where the data comes from
Since 2021, every new passenger car sold in the EU must carry an on-board fuel consumption monitoring device (OBFCM). It records the total fuel used and the total distance driven over the car’s life. Under Article 12 of Regulation (EU) 2019/631, carmakers and member states report these readings, and the European Environment Agency (EEA) publishes them every year, one row per car, together with the car’s official type-approval data.
We use the EEA datasets for the reporting years 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024. They are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. RealFuelConsumption is not affiliated with the EEA or the European Commission.
Which cars are included
- Only cars the EEA itself marks as used in calculation (the agency excludes records it considers implausible or incomplete).
- Cars with at least 1,000 km on the meter. Below that, a few cold starts can dominate the average.
- Lifetime averages up to 30 L/100 km; higher values are data errors. Plug-in hybrids that have used no fuel at all (always driven on electricity) are kept, because that is a real result.
- An engine gets its own page only with at least 100 cars; country rows need at least 50.
Each page uses the most recent reporting year with enough cars. Counted that way, the site covers 8,913,375 cars on 1,643 engine pages and 325 model pages. Fully electric cars and natural-gas (CNG) cars are not included: the meter measures liquid fuel, and CNG is measured in kilograms.
How cars are grouped
The data names cars by make and commercial name, as registered by the manufacturer. We clean up spelling variants (for example “VOLKSWAGEN, VW” and “VOLKSWAGEN. VW”), remove the make repeated inside the model name and group trims into a model family (all “CLIO …” names become the Renault Clio). An engine is a model with one powertrain type and one power output in kW; registration years and engine sizes within it are combined.
Powertrain types come from the fuel type and fuel mode in the data. Hybrid covers every car the manufacturer registered as a non-plug-in hybrid, including 48-volt mild hybrids. Plug-in hybrid covers cars that can be charged from the grid.
Grouping by name is not perfect. If you think a car is in the wrong group, tell us.
Real-world consumption
For each engine, the headline figure is the total fuel used divided by the total distance driven by all its cars, which is how the EEA itself calculates fleet averages. Long-distance cars therefore weigh more than cars that are rarely used. The spread (median, quartiles, tenths) uses each car’s own lifetime average.
The same cars appear in several reporting years with their updated lifetime totals. We never add years together: each page shows the most recent year with enough cars, and earlier years separately.
Official (WLTP) consumption
The official figure is the WLTP combined fuel consumption recorded for each car at registration, averaged over the cars of the engine. Where that field is missing (it is often empty in the newest data), we convert the official WLTP CO₂ value to litres with a ratio measured in the same data, separately for each powertrain, from cars that have both values: 1 L/100 km corresponds to about 22.7 g CO₂/km for petrol cars and 26.3 g CO₂/km for diesel cars (plug-in hybrids have their own ratio). Pages using a converted figure say so.
Plug-in hybrids
Plug-in hybrid meters also record the distance driven in electric mode with the engine off, the distance driven with a charged battery but the engine running, and the electricity charged from the grid. The electric share is the electric-mode distance divided by total distance, counting only cars that report these fields.
Costs
Fuel costs use the average pump prices including taxes from the European Commission Weekly Oil Bulletin of 12 October 2026: Euro-super 95 for petrol and hybrid cars, diesel for diesel cars and LPG for LPG cars. Electricity prices for households come from Eurostat (nrg_pc_204). All prices are in euros as published by the Commission. The yearly distance is a value you choose; we start from 15,000 km as an example.
What these numbers cannot tell you
- They are averages over many drivers, climates and roads. Your own consumption depends on how, where and how far you drive.
- The readings are reported by manufacturers and member states. The EEA screens them for plausibility but does not test cars, and neither do we.
- A gap between official and real consumption is expected: the official test is a fixed laboratory cycle. A large gap does not mean that a car breaks any rule.
- Cars registered from 2021 onwards only, and only models with at least 100 cars in the data.
Engines whose real-world average is more than 10% below or more than 50% above the official figure are marked as possibly unreliable: such values usually come from reporting errors. They stay visible with a warning but are left out of rankings, averages and search engines. Individual cars reporting more than three times, or less than a third of, their own official consumption are discarded as data errors.