When Nissan published a press release mentioning that one of its cars had travelled more than 800 miles on a single tank of fuel, the company was naturally hoping for a bit of positive publicity.

What they didn’t quite expect, however, was the huge amount of interest the article was about to generate. Coverage appeared not only in the UK, but abroad, too – and even as far away as Australia!

As we reported on Nissan Insider, a Qashqai equipped with Nissan’s third-generation e-POWER technology was recently put to the test by engineers who completed the iconic Land’s End to John O’Groats journey on a single tank of fuel… with some left over!

Driving 18 hours over two days, colleagues from Nissan Technical Centre Europe in Cranfield, Bedfordshire, drove two Qashqai e-POWER vehicles the full length of the UK.

They travelled 837 miles using just one tank of petrol, with 100 miles of fuel to spare at the finish line. Confirming new Qashqai’s best-in-class fuel economy, the team achieved 75mpg on the epic challenge.

Shortly after the story was distributed to news outlets in the UK and abroad, Nissan’s press and media monitoring teams started to notice the phenomenal levels of interest in the piece.

Automotive trade titles in the UK such as Car Dealer, Automotive Management and Motor Trade News were quick to upload the article to their websites. Not far behind were a number of local titles – such as the Wolverhampton Express & Star and Shropshire Star; not to mention of course, other popular motoring titles like Autocar, CarsUK and Eurekar.

Leading online news sites such as MSN, Yahoo! and AOL wanted a piece of the action too – and as we have mentioned, the story was even published abroad – on sites such as SpeedMe (Russia), The Irish News and GoAuto.com (Australia).

Interesting reading

A Nissan spokesperson said: ‘‘We knew that the Land’s End to John O’Groats trip completed by Qashqai with new e-POWER was remarkable – and it seems media outlets from all around the world agreed with us! Naturally we have been delighted that the story has made interesting reading in locations as varied as Birmingham and Brisbane.

‘‘Nissan’s new e-POWER technology delivers best-in-class driving performance, fuel economy and emissions – and as the headlines generated over the past few days have shown, it passed its Land’s End to John O’Groats test with flying colours.”