With a summer of sport now underway, cars sporting national flags has become a common sight.
It will be no surprise that the addition of a flag hanging off your car will cause a small amount of additional drag, which will impact on your fuel economy.
Academic Dr Antonio Filippone calculated that an average car with two flags attached travelling at speeds of 70 miles per hour can burn on average an extra litre of fuel. He added: ''this may not seem significant to the individual, but if half a million cars are flying these flags we could see millions of extra litres of fuels being burned.''
This extra consumption in fuel will also have a knock on effect on the emissions being produced by a car. It was estimated that during the world cup, around half a million cars flying national flags added an additional 2.8 million kilograms of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
