View Single Post
Old 09-25-2019, 04:32 PM   #356 (permalink)
JSH
AKA - Jason
 
JSH's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2009
Location: PDX
Posts: 3,479

Adventure Seeker - '04 Chevy Astro - Campervan
90 day: 17.3 mpg (US)
Thanks: 305
Thanked 2,051 Times in 1,385 Posts
Quote:
Originally Posted by iikhod View Post
Litres/100km is the most logic way, at least in my opinion.
Where does this miles per gallon come originally? How far you can drive with a can of petrol?
Yes that is the reason. It is a very consumer friendly unit of measure for some to know how many gallons of fuel they need to buy to go on a trip. I need to go 100 miles to grandma’s house and my car gets 25 mpg so I need to buy 4 gallons. I know people that fuel their cars like this a few gallons at a time because they can’t afford to just fill the tank when it is empty.

However MPG is a really poor unit of measure to compare one car to another when you are car shopping because it is not a linear scale. For that purpose liters / 100 km or gallons / 100 miles is much more useful. Why don’t we change? The same reason we don’t use the metric system: inertia and the inability to admit the rest of the world does something better than in the USA.

FYI you can go to fueleconomy.gov and find the EPA rating fuel economy for every car sold in the USA back to the 80’s. They gave ratings for Miles per gallon and Gallons / 100 miles along with other useful things like interior volume, cost to fill a tank, estimated yearly fuel costs, etc

That is also why I use EPA numbers when talking about fuel economy standards. Anyone can go online and find the EPA rating for any vehicle sold in the USA. CAFE numbers are buried 100s of pages deep in NHTSA reports.
  Reply With Quote
The Following 3 Users Say Thank You to JSH For This Useful Post:
Frank Lee (09-25-2019), iikhod (09-26-2019), redpoint5 (09-25-2019)