Audi A4

Do you shop No Frills exclusively? Do you always forget your wallet on a night out with friends? Do you cut giveaway coupons from the papers with religious zeal, and then hand-deliver them on your 10-speed to save on postage?

Calling all misers, Scrooges and anoraks: Your Audi has arrived. Those pocket-protector-packing donk-boffins from Audi have come up with a way to slash automotive running costs by 55 cents a day. I know! Blew me away, too. Why, if one squirrelled this unexpected windfall into a 5pc term deposit it'd earn an incredible $5.52 interest in the first year alone. Now, that'd teach those filthy banks.

Audi's previous economy king in the A4 mid-size sedan family slurped 5.8 litres for every 100km. Quelle Horreur! The new economy king is the Audi A4 TDIe (morbid name, that), which combines electrickery with aerodynamics and less power to slash almost 20 percent off the fuel bill. To prove it, Audi made us drive it from the delectable vineyards of the Clare Valley in South Australia to the desolate mining slag heaps of Broken Hill via the second most boring road in this amazing country.

There are no corners on this road, and the few bends come just often enough to rule out a nap. For 400 plodding kilometres the scenery changes from desert red to desert red and back again. The Audi TDIe - the new cheapest A4 model at $49,990 - makes fuel-saving suggestions, such as the optimum gear choice at a given speed, or that having the air-con on and the window down is not ideal. It also happily shows you the impact air-conditioning has on fuel economy, at times as high as 0.4L/100km. Seems a fair exchange to knock the 37 degree temp outside to a more comfortable 22 degrees inside.

I diligently monitored economy for the first five minutes, then got bored. I plugged the iPod in and began a more enjoyable journey through AC/DC's entire discography, the Audi's 10 speakers doing justice to Bon Scott's banshee vocals. Time and distance melted before the hard-rock onslaught and we arrived at Broken Hill just before Bon met his Vodka-swilling demise after his own Highway to Hell.

Driving along Broken Hill's main street, which boasted 32 watering holes in the town's long-gone mining heyday, the Audi's trip computer said we'd averaged 5.3L/100km for the 400km trip, a saving of $2.60. I briefly considered postponing my first beer and setting off to find the nearest bank. Briefly.

Glenn Butler