The top 10 most fuel-efficient new cars you can buy today

It hasn’t been a fun few weeks for drivers in the UK. With fuel stations running dry across the country, queues at the pumps have stretched back so far they’ve caused gridlock in some towns and cities, while tempers have frayed among drivers forced to wait for hours on end to buy the fuel they’ve needed to go about their daily lives. 

We haven’t seen the end of it yet, either. Demand has sent prices skyrocketing – last week, the RAC said that the average price of a litre of petrol had risen to 137p, the highest that figure has been since 2013, and prices could go higher still, with both petrol and diesel predicted to rise by as much as another 5p per litre by Christmas. 

One way around all this, of course, is to buy an electric car. But they still don’t work for everyone just yet – so if you need to stick with petrol or diesel for the time being, what options do you have? Well, the most obvious is to buy the most frugal car you can. 

Which cars are those, though? We’ve gathered together the top 10 most fuel-efficient new petrol, diesel and hybrid cars you can buy in Britain. We’ve ranked them by their official WLTP combined fuel consumption figures; while these probably won’t accurately reflect what you’ll be able to achieve in the real world, they are at least useful for meaningful comparison, as they’re all obtained under the same set of predefined test conditions. 

And we’ve also excluded plug-in hybrids, because while they boast fabulous official figures these are wholly dependent on how much charge they have and, therefore, how often they’re plugged in. Great if you’ve got somewhere to do so – not so much if you haven’t.

So if you haven’t got somewhere to plug in your car, and you are worried about fuel prices and availability in the UK, these are the cars that should be on your list to try: the 10 most economical new cars on sale today. 

Renault Clio