Urban form is regularly identified as a potential key factor for reducing road traffic and the resulting energy consumption, but the nature of the link between mobility and urban form has been subject to considerable debate. This paper employs quantitative research methods to investigate the influence of urban form on daily mobility energy consumption. First, we used archetypal cities, representative of French large-sized cities, which allow us to isolate the impact of urban form and to have more generalised results. Second, we simulated daily mobility in those archetypal cities by using an individual-based daily mobility simulation model, Mobisim-Soft and then calculated the resulting energy consumptions. Our results confirm that the periurban city is the most energy consuming compare to the axialized and the polycentric cities, but it appears that the global structure of an agglomeration is a second-order factor compared to the inner arrangement of its neighbourhoods.