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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

I live in the UK and have my car set to litres per 100km - it's so much easier, if I know my car uses 5L of fuel per 100km travelled and I need to drive 300 miles(500km) down to London I instantly know that I'll need about 25 litres of fuel to complete the journey. Knowing that petrol is about £1.30/litre also gives me an instant estimate of the cost of such journey.

The same thing with MPG: 5L/100km is about 56mpg, so for the same trip to London we'll need about 5.5 gallons. Which is great to know except that I have no idea how much is a gallon from the top of my head. I have to Google it, apparently it's about 3.7 litres? But....that's not right, the figure is now different. Ah. US vs UK Gallon, and of course Google shows me US Gallon as a result for gallon, despite knowing I'm in UK. Imperial gallon is 4.5L and now we arrive at the same number of 25L for the trip.

It's not impossible, I just find the first way much easier to work with.

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It's easier if the pump sells in liters, which is not true in the US.

You have 20 gallons, and 20MPG gets you 400 miles, that is an easy calculation. All you have to do is to throw away all the metric unit.

20MPG?! You must be driving an American car. ;)

I drove my parents farm truck for a couple of weeks to commute because my car had broken down and boy was that expensive. 12 mpg if I remember correctly. The gas pump at the station would stop at $100 and the tank wouldn't be full.

LOL, it sounds like you're driving a semi to work.

Yeah it's a RAM1500 with V8 hemi engine, tbh, it almost never hit 20 mpg.. It occasionally hits 19mpg if I'm driving interstate

Well of course, but the article was specifically talking about the madness that is the fact that all UK fuel stations sell fuel in litres, but all cars have their fuel consumption advertised in miles per gallon, even though gallons aren't used anywhere in the UK for anything except for this, and your average < 40 years old person will have no intuitive understanding of how much a gallon actually is.

But UK is full of nonsense like this, kilograms are commonly used for everything, but human weight is given in stones(wtf is a stone), metres are again a common unit, but somehow kilometres for distances aren't. Your own height is given in feet and inches, and my satnav when set to miles gives me turn directions in.....yards(wtf is a yard). I have never heard anyone use yards for literally anything ever in the UK. With furniture/room sizes all dimensions are given in milimetres and centimetres but you'd commonly say you cracked the window open by an inch. Cars use miles per hour for the speedos, but trains use kilometres per hour.

I think I could keep going on and on and on about this.

Much better would be selling fuel in kilograms because summer liter and winter liter are two quite different quantity of fuel.

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