BMW claim that a diesel 3 series will get 61mpg. Volkswagen reckon a Golf 2.0 TDI will do 68mpg. Electric is still significantly better, but you didn't need pick a terrible diesel car as an example.
The UK also does for some God awful reason (especially infuriating considering it's sold by the litre at the petrol station).
In the United States and some other countries, a gallon is equal to 128 fluid ounces or 3.785 liters. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom and some Commonwealth countries, a gallon is equal to 160 fluid ounces or 4.546 liters.
In fairness the fluid ounces are also different, an Imperial (english) fluid ounce is 28.41306mL, while a US Customary fl oz is 29.5735mL. So the Imperial floz is 96% the US customary, not enough to account for having 25% more of them in a gallon, but it does lead to the Imperial gallon only being 20% larger than the customary gallon.
But wait there’s more! The US also has the “food labelling” fluid ounce which is not the customary one, instead it’s exactly 30mL.
And yet we claim to live in a science based society.
I mean, there are a million things, that do not need universal standards, but standards are imposed anyway.
But where one standard would be really helpful, like scientific values, we have many. And some people would rather go to prison, than adopt. (I think that happened in the UK, after they force switched to metric)
The UK also uses pints for dairy milk, but litres for plant-based milks. UK must be completely disregarded if you're looking to make sense about what units to use.
The UK may be the most confusing; fuel is sold in litres, but fuel efficiency is expressed in MPG, and furthermore the gallons aren't the same as US gallons. I guess at least the miles are the same!
Only since the 1958 International Yard and Pound Agreement tho. Before then the US used what is now known as the Survey Mile, which is why the survey mile exists (and survived until this year).
I suspect the British fuel system is designed to hide the cost per mile of driving, at least tacitly. At present it's difficult to work out without some external tool.
It's more like once it's established it's hard to change - if you started listing 'miles per litre' that would be like it was 'designed to hide the cost of driving', because I would have no idea how that compared.
(Quite normally for my age in the UK I think, I'm familiar with both metric & Imperial measurements, but generally fairly bad at converting. Except I know 568ml = 1 (UK! Not US!) pint - for which I can thank my alma mater Imperial and its student bars: Metric, and FiveSixEight. I could probably guess effectively at lbs and kg from butter/flour. Of course I know 2.54cm = 1". A yard is 'a bit' less than 1m. It's the bigger ones that seem more obscure/are harder to work out from familiarity I suppose.)
> It's more like once it's established it's hard to change - if you started listing 'miles per litre' that would be like it was 'designed to hide the cost of driving', because I would have no idea how that compared.
1. I think with liters, people typically reverse the relationship so it's liters/100km. Which is a much more intuitive unit.
2. If you're buying gas in liters, I think it'd be a lot easier to switch over to using liters for efficiency. You may not be able to compare easily to other vehicles, but you'd be able to estimate your personal fuel more easily.
I think it's the other way around. Distance per quantity of fuel is the intuitive measurement that humans understand and can relate directly to how much fuel they purchase. It could be argued that it is less intuitive when comparing two cars, however. Although better MPG is still strictly better, which is about the level of detail most non-nerds care about.
An other possibility is that the brits like having wonky things, just look at the pre-decimalisation monetary system, or the counties (https://youtu.be/hCc0OsyMbQk).
We only switched to selling by the litre in the early 90s (presumably for the sake of EU alignment), it was sold in Gallons until then. Expressing efficiency in MPG is just something that had "stuck" by then.
Not quite. The EU directive said that governments should if they wanted pass a law to say metric units should be displayed. The UK government chose to ratify that law, but with the caveat that imperial units could be displayed as well if shops wanted to display them (and most did).
At no point was it ever illegal do display the old units. There were no martyrs; there were only idiots.
What I absolutely love about this fact is that America is still using British Imperial units. After literally having a war over whether or not the US should be independent of British rule, you're still holding on to our measuring system despite the rest of the world moving on.
Clam down, we are just talking about how measure systems. And the previous ones existed not because of cultural differences, but because every king and tyrant wanted to decide which stick their vassals should use to measure the world.
My diesel 3 series (2.9 litre, late 90s design) would get 8.83 L/100 km (32 mpg UK, 26 mpg US) driving round town, stopping at traffic lights and averaging <20 mph and never getting past 3rd gear. This didn't require much care, just a question of not trying to accelerate too hard at low RPMs or doing a 0-60 run from every stop.
Engine technology will presumably have moved on in the past 25 years, and efficiency will have improved, but you'll still get crappy fuel economy for stopping and starting all the time.
Volkswagen has already been caught cheating (on its emissions) —- not sure I would trust their claims without an independent third party checking on that.
The Cruze is way better than that anyway, you'd need to be in an excruciating traffic jam to get that low mileage.
Well, my 12 years old (gas) Honda Fit does +40MPG being very "pedal happy" and near 50 driving normally, and my dad's 20 years old (diesel) Citroen Xsara Picasso does around 60MPG
20 years ago was kind of a sweet spot for diesel automobile fuel efficiency. Emissions were terrible though. Then they tried to clean up the tail pipe emissions and lost most of the efficiency gains.
Yep, although they're becoming better again. Not that I'm a diesel apologist, I hate it, but I guess we're used to smaller and more efficient cars in Europe (even with the SUV craze)
Due to dieselgate, there was a peak in diesel car efficiency around 2006. Post 2006 diesels get less fuel efficiency, because they had to tweak the engines to lower the combustion temperature to reduce NOX emissions. (which also reduces efficiency).
I had a BMW series 3. 61mpg is 3.8l/100km and that's… dreamland. You can probably achieve that in ideal conditions, driving 50km/h on a highway.
Very few people check the facts, and the only reliable way to know yourself is to take notes at the pump: gas pumped vs km travelled. I did check for a while and the numbers were quite different :-)
On a related note, for the VW ID.4, the manufacturer states 17kWh/100km which is actually achievable (much to my surprise) in city driving when it isn't cold. My real numbers are closer to 21kWh/100km. This goes up really quickly if you exceed 130km/h.
