2014 Chevy Cruze Turbo Diesel Has Arrived!

BEAVERTON, Ore. - June 7, 2013 - PRLog -- The 2014 Chevrolet Cruze Diesel will be something of a highway star when it goes on sale, with an EPA-estimated rating of 46 mpg highway.

That's better than previous estimates of around 42 MPG, and if other diesels on the market today are anything to go by, some owners may find themselves beating even those figures.

The healthy highway rating should be enough to endow the Cruze Diesel with a 700-mile highway range, or ten hours of highway driving--you'd be stopping for food or bathroom breaks more than you'd need to stop for fuel.

Chevy has been keen to pair economy with performance on the diesel Cruze, mindful of some customers' perceptions of diesels as slow and noisy. The 2.0-liter diesel unit develops a punchy 258 pounds-feet of torque and 148 horsepower, and an overboost function can raise torque to around 280 lb-ft when you really need the performance.

Equipped with a six-speed automatic transmission as standard, the Cruze TD can reach 60 mph in 8.6 seconds, so performance shouldn't be an issue for most buyers.

With a 15.6 gallon gas tank, that 46 mpg should be enough to get you over 700 miles at highway speeds--717, to be precise. But one GM engineer has gone even better, with an astonishing 900 miles on a tank.

Reversing the math, that works out at just shy of 58 mpg, if she ran the tank dry--so potentially a little more.

How on earth do you get that from a Cruze Diesel? According to Tessa Baughman, the energy engineer in question, it simply involved traveling at 5 under the speed limit on a family visit to Arkansas.

Even on the return journey, with more traffic, she achieved over 800 miles to a tank - just over 51 mpg.

Information from Green Cars.com