The driver of our lead car, Joshua Dowling, had just done some quick sums based on his car’s distance-to-empty read-out and come to the conclusion he wasn’t going to make it to the NSW-Victoria border town without a pit-stop or a jerry can.

"How are you guys going for fuel?" came the query over the two-way radios.

His distance to empty read-out told him he had a range of 80km and Albury was still about 90km away.

I scrolled through my car's trip computer and told him, with just a hint of smugness, that I had 159km range.

Meanwhile, our third driver, Robert McDonald, had 129km on the clock.

"No guesses who got the bloody E10 car, then," fired Josh.

It had been a recurring theme over more than 2000km of testing identical cars over a mix of city and highway cycles.

The aim of the experiment: to work out which type of fuel provided the best value-for-money: standard unleaded fuel, premium or E10, a blend of 10pc ethanol and 90pc regular unleaded.

Our testers – we had 10 different drivers over the drive program – weren't told which fuel was in which car.

We also switched drivers regularly to make sure that we evened out the differences in weights and driving styles (driving habits can contribute significantly to fuel consumption).

Each time we drove around town we completed the same loop three times in each car, with each driver completing a complete circuit in each car.

But despite our best attempts to keep the identities of the cars a secret (we decided that blindfolding the drivers wasn't really an option), it became clear early on with each refuel which car had which fuel.

The difference was obvious by looking at the needles on our fuel gauges, there wasn't really any need to go to the distance-to-empty or average fuel consumption read-outs to be sure.

Even though there was only a few litres difference in fuel use over the tank, even by the half way mark there were notable differences in where the fuel gauges were sitting.

The ethanol blend car was using a lot more juice than the others. We knew it would – even the car manufacturers and oil companies admit that. But what we wanted to know was whether it was enough to nullify the advantage of a cheaper bowser price.

The answer was yes, as Josh discovered as he crawled the streets of Albury looking for an E10 bowser.

Thankfully, we can report that the Camry has some slack in its distance-to-empty readout. We'd estimate ay least 10km worth.