The Luxury Cars With The Best Gas Mileage

At 430 horsepower and with a huge V8 engine, the 2014 Audi R8 will go from 0-60mph in just over four seconds and hit nearly 200 miles per hour. It also gets 11 miles to the gallon in the city–not exactly the ideal model for maximizing range (and beach time!) during a spring weekend away.

But there are a few luxury cars that get exemplary gas mileage. The $39,500Lexus ES 300h, for instance, gets 40 miles to the gallon in city/highway averaged driving and provides luxurious amenities like leather interiors, bamboo trim and an extended rear seat. It pairs a plush ride with Lexus’s most fuel-friendly version to date of the newly revamped midsize sedan.

The same goes for the $32,050 Lexus CT 200h, which gets a whopping 42mph in combined city/highway driving and is the least expensive—and most fuel-efficient—vehicle Lexus offers.

And Cadillac, Detroit’s luxury darling, offers a $75,000 ELR plug-in hybrid car that gets 82mpg for its first 37 miles of driving and 33mpg after that. That’s not bad considering the brand’s big, bad, gas-guzzling image of years past.

“People who buy luxury cars are typically not cash-strapped to begin with, so they may not be particularly concerned with saving money on fuel, but there are other areas of appeal beyond the EPA number–especially with range,” says Jack Nerad, the executive market analyst at Kelley Blue Book.

In fact, you might think that well-apportioned, powerful luxury sedans always get worse gas mileage than their more mainstream cousins, but premium automakers like Acura and Lincoln are focusing more than ever on making everything super efficient, super clean, and super lightweight (Exhibit A: carbon fiber everything). They’ve realized that more often than not, buyers these days who can afford to pick from plenty of options are routinely choosing the most efficient of the lot.

Read on to see other brands on our list of this year’s luxury cars with the best gas mileage. You’ll be surprised what makes the cut.

Behind the Numbers

The experts at Kelley Blue Book compiled this year’s data, which evaluated all 2014 model-year vehicles that promise a combined city/highway rate of 35 mpg or more. Hybrids and plug-ins, diesels, pure electric vehicles and even some gas-only entries made the cut.

The diversity is a good thing, Nerad says, as long as it’s managed well.

“More choices sometimes make the choice difficult–but that’s a good problem to have,” he says.

Still, there is much room for growth when it comes to efficiency, since most of the vehicles in the luxury segment fall woefully behind the ones enumerated here in terms of efficiency. Engine size, vehicle weight and aerodynamics all affect how many miles a car or truck will suck from its tank, and those factors are largely driven by market demands rather than environmental altruism. (One interesting note pertaining to expensive cars: Drag is the dominant player in efficiency on long straight roads like Interstates, and vehicle length has a huge effect on drag, and shorter cars have more drag than longer ones, so in some cases a big luxury car – which can better approximate the aerodynamically superior teardrop shape than a tiny econo-box – might get superior highway efficiency to a smaller one.)

Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors , has led the charge in improving efficiency by creating a 100-percent electric luxury sedan, the Model S, for a competitive price, and his similarly-fueled Model X SUV is due out later this year.

The South African billionaire said when he founded the company that it’s up to automakers to push for sustainably fueled and efficient cars.

“The overarching purpose of Tesla Motors (and the reason I am funding the company) is to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy, which I believe to be the primary, but not exclusive, sustainable solution,” Musk says. “Critical to making that happen is an electric car without compromises.”

source "www.forbes.com"