Noel Ebdon's Volvo S80 V8

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LET'S BYPASS: Noel's clearly got too much time on his hands. He drives Dubai's brand new bypass road on an economy run to try and get consumption down to 8.3L/100km.

Our Volvo S80's supreme highway skills have been called into action to explore Dubai's newest bypass road.

My main concern with the big volvo over the past few months has been its petrol consumption. Okay, so I'm not quite sure what I expect from a 4.4-litre V8, but my wallet has been screaming in pain each time I pull into the petrol station to fill up the thirsty tank.

So in an effort to prove or disprove the theory once and for all, I threw away my concrete boots and took the S80 for a drinking game on the brand new Dubai Bypass Road, which despite running right past my house, was virgin territory for me and the Volvo.

Hitting the tarmac at the start in Jebel Ali on the road that cuts across from the Free Zone to the Al Ain road, I started at a very leisurely 100kph, with the onboard computer busy working out my current average fuel usage.

It soon settled down to a respectable 9.4 litres/100kms on the flat, but on one down hill section I did see 8.8 flash up briefly. The only trouble with driving at 100kph on an empty highway is that occasionally you get buzzed by a low flying aircraft, or it could have been a Mercedes CLK55.

It was hard to tell as his sonic wave rocked the slow moving Volvo.

With the sand still settling from the Merc/Fighter Jet I pushed the speed up to 120kph, only to find a roundabout with traffic lights looming up in front of me. Only in the Gulf could they put traffic lights on a six lane highway!

With the impromptu roundabout despatched it was soon back up to 120, with the consumption hovering around the 10.8 mark, dropping to 10.2 on hills and on one occasion as low as 9.1 on a particularly steep bit!

By now I was approaching the Hatta road and needed to slow down for the maze that forms some kind of junction for the Bypass, Academic City and Al Aweer. After that the bypass simply becomes the old Al Aweer road that connects to the Sharjah-Dhaid road.

This time I tried 140kph. 12.4 litres/100 kms popped up on the computer with a few 11.6s thrown in for good measure. There was a brief 10.5, but that was with a tail wind and a large dip in the road!

So basically if you take 120 kph and the car's 70-litre fuel tank, you could in theory cruise on the highway all day and cover around 650 kms on one full tank of gas. It may not be the 8.3 litres/100 kms quoted on Volvo's web site for highway driving, but it's still pretty good really.

So what did my bypass road experiment reveal? That the Volvo can be economical if you drive it nice and smoothly, that no-one seems to be using the Dubai bypass road and that I have completely lost control of my lead foot!

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