20112011 Ford Mustang V-6
Tribune Media Services
The 2011 Ford Mustang is the first car with more than 300 horsepower to get over 30 mpg on the highway, and a Ford team recently proved it can do even better: It stretched one 16-gallon tank of gas to 776.5 miles.
If you're not a mathematician, that's 48.5 mpg, which rivals numbers put up by today's most efficient hybrids like the Honda Insight and Toyota Prius.
There's an important caveat to that number, though. The drivers were cruising around the Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee at a limp 43.9 mph average speed. The Ford team originally wanted to see if the Mustang could get 1,000 laps (a total of 533 miles) but blew past that mark with the tank still a quarter full.
The driving team included Tom Barnes, Jonathan Mehl, Carl Ek, David Ragan and Seong Park, who took one-hour turns behind the wheel over the course of the 17 hours it took for the Mustang's tank to run dry.