Can fuel efficiency be fun?

Petrol has reached at least £1.40 a litre in most parts of the UK yet there's no sign of the road blocks and forecourt chaos we had in the mid naughties - when the price hit a now-enviable £1.20. Where is everyone?! I can only assume we're resigned to having our wallets emptied as we fill the tank and our energy to protest is as spent as our cash.

Adding more wounds to our punctured purse now are the actual makers of our cars who, it seems, have been duping us for years with optimistic fuel economy figures. I know this is true because my daily runner is a Range Rover V8 - petrol, ouch - which I use mostly around town and get in the region of 15mpg. It rises to a celebratory 18mpg when I venture on motorways but on most trips I feel like dropping the window and the contents of my bank account with it. My husband managed a heady 24mpg once but I don't have the patience for such fun-zapping behaviour.

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Over the last 12 months fuel economy has become a topic of choice for me. Where once I chatted merrily about the merits of rear-wheel drive and brake horse power, now I'm chewing the fat over fuel economy - a subject I once thought of as beyond tedious and totally irrelevant to my life. Happy days.

But now I'm left open-mouthed, wide-eyed and incredibly jealous as I listen to the smug 'over 50mpg' brigade who whizz by petrol stations without a sweat on. And, much to the disgust of my fellow Fifth Gear petrolhead Tiff Needell, I am obsessed with CO2 emission figures as well. Oh yes, it's a barrel of laughs talking to me these days. If fuel economy is your priority then my Rangey will rank as your number one enemy, but there are worse.

However, there's a new breed of machine that will excite the misers - an 'extended-range electric vehicle' where the petrol engine acts as a generator for the electric motor, rather than powering the driven wheels directly and zapping fuel under load as in a hybrid.

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The current Car of the Year, the Vauxhall Ampera, is one such car and it boasts a mahoosive 235mpg. My jaw is still grazed from that fact. I don't know how accurate the number will be when someone like me has driven it for more than hour, but even if you account for a 35% drop (found in worst cases by What Car? magazine MPG controlled tests) that's still good for 153mpg.

It'll do up to 50 miles as an all-electric car and a further 350 miles with the engine ticking away. It's surprisingly decent to drive, has a fabulously futuristic interior and looks all right from the outside. You can buy one for £30,000 (government grant already taken into account) and it seats four adults so it'll do just fine in a one-car household.

But you need to fully charge the electric motor overnight because it's too inefficient to ask the 1.4-litre petrol engine to do it while on the move, and that requires some infrastructure at home. And then there's the expensive issue of replacing the battery once the car turns eight years old, so the future's not quite so shiny when you look long-term or secondhand.

A more glamorous version of this technology can be found in the Fisker Karma. Made in California where the sun always shines, it even has a solar-panelled roof to help power little things like the radio.

It's an £86,000, four-seater, four-door coupé to rival a Mercedes-Benz CLS and it makes its noise in looks alone (though there's a slight sound alerting pedestrians to its presence in town).

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The biggest concern I have about a car like this is that it won't feel like the powerful performance machine its design deigns. But a stab on the throttle quickly reminds you that the adrenalin junkie's best friend - torque - is right at hand. Or at foot. It's not only got 918lb ft of the stuff on tap from the off (a Ferrari 458 has 398lb ft) but it's also all yours in one fat maximum delicious dollop, so the Karma can hit 62mph in 5.9 seconds. You feel that punch, even if you can't hear it, and its in-gear acceleration is just as forceful so you don't really miss a V8, V10 or V12 at all... Well, not as much as you'd fear.

So perhaps we should all embrace the next generation of fuel-saving technology because there's still some fun to be had. Though my traditional heart will forever beat for the likes of the €1 million Pagani Huyara - the 6.0-litre V12-powered ubercar with stop-start technology only when you turn the key.

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