One of the problems caused by aldultered fuels is that injector nozzles tend to expand and therefore fail to allow fuel to pass in droplets as it was designed. With the fuel problems we have, that could be one cause of the increase in fuel consumption.
However, the kind of lubricants that you use during service have also had an impact in the fuel consumptions for these morden cars. Because of the strigent environmental requirements, the amount of combustions by products are limited in most cases by recycling the soot from the exhaust so that even the remaining small unburnt fuels could be burned. However, by recycling the soot the amount of temperature in the engine is also increased. If owner use lubricants of low performance grade, the lubricant would fail to perform proper work of lubrication. Without proper lubrication, alot of energy is lost in form of heat due to friction. Therefore more fuel would be burned to enable the engine to cover less distance as it was expected.
Lubrication is very key in enabling the engines to have the designed performance.