Economical cars for sale

Find the finest economical cars for sale right now with BuyaCar. If you are looking to cut the cost of driving and reduce your environmental impact, here you will find the best choice of economy-focused models for sale, including hybrids. Find your new economical car online now, buy it or finance it, then wait for it to be delivered to your door today.

What are the most economical cars?

While there is no official definition of what constitutes an economical car, the best benchmark we have to go by is each car’s claimed fuel consumption in miles per gallon, usually shortened to mpg. Cars sold in the UK are legally required to have this mpg figure, tested under the standardised Worldwide Light vehicle Test Procedure (mercifully reduced to WLTP for ease), readily available in showrooms, brochures and the manufacturers’ websites.

It isn’t a perfect system, though, as it’s skewed in favour of plug-in hybrid cars, so while the Mercedes GLC 300 de can officially achieve 565.0mpg, you will struggle to get close to that in the real world. Regular hybrids give a more realistic indication of what you can expect, although they are still on the high side, as the 70.6mpg claim for the Toyota Yaris indicates. What of diesels, the long-time economy champions? Many manufacturers have scaled-back the diesels they sell due to dwindling sales of new ones, but the current top fuel-miser is the Volkswagen T-Roc 2.0 TDI 115PS, with a claim of up to 59.0mpg.

What is exactly is an economical car?

As there’s no accepted definition of an ‘economical car’, common sense has to be applied, meaning everything is relative to using the least possible amount of petrol or diesel for any given journey. Small cars with petrol hybrid systems, such as those found in the Honda Jazz and Renault Clio will perform superbly in stop-start urban traffic, but will have to work much harder – and consequently be less economical – where lots of high speed motorway driving is required. Where that kind of journey dominates your driving, larger-engined diesels such as the Audi A6, Mercedes E-Class and Peugeot 508 will typically perform better.

Without going deeply technical, while electric cars don’t use fuel, electricity is classed as energy and recharging the batteries costs money. Instead of mpg, the efficiency of electric models is generally referred to in the UK as the slightly clumsy miles per kilowatt hour, or mi/kWh in abbreviated form. The good news here is it makes it relatively easy to determine the approximate range of an EV. If it has a 50kWh battery and an official efficiency figure of 4.0mi/kWh, multiplying the two numbers gives a range of 200 miles.

What are the advantages of driving an economical car?

Economical cars just make sense from a financial and environmental point of view, with longer-term legislation essentially forcing manufacturers to strive for ever-improving levels of efficiency. The good news is that there are a whole host of excellent economical cars, balancing performance, convenience and efficiency to suit all budgets. What’s more, in addition to having lower fuel and energy costs, these efficiency champions have no-to-very-low emissions, meaning many are exempt from clean air zone charges.