gallons per hundred miles make much more sense than that.
incidentally, this is the measure rest of the world is advertising, except usually in liters per 100km.
there's a good reason for this: comparisons linear instead of inversely proportional. 6l/100km is 50% better than 9l/100km. 30mpg vs 20mpg is... not as simple.
I guess it's a matter of approach. Europeans are traveling familiar, constant distances and worry about fuel cost. Americans just fill up their tank and worry how far they can go :)
If I buy 2 gallons of gas, and my car gets 30 mpg, then I can go 60 miles. Doesn't seem that hard to me. Need the other way around? I need to go 100 miles. At 30 miles per gallon, that's a little over 3 gallons. This is simple mental math.
"Quick, which is better: Replacing an 18-mpg car with a 28-mpg one, or going from a 34-mpg car to one that returns 50 mpg? Researchers at Duke University say that drivers find it easier to select the right answer when efficiency is expressed as gallons per 100 miles (g/100m).
So 18 mpg (or 5.5 g/100m) versus 28 mpg (3.6 g/100m)--an increase of 10 mpg--represents a 52 percent reduction in consumption.
If you trade in a car rated at 34 mpg for one rated at 50 mpg, its a 16-mpg improvement, so we ought to see those gas card bills plummeting, right? Actually, after a minute's worth of math, you'll get 2.9g/100m in the 34-mpg car and 2g/100m in the 50-mpg car--only half as big a gain as the original scenario. "
incidentally, this is the measure rest of the world is advertising, except usually in liters per 100km.
there's a good reason for this: comparisons linear instead of inversely proportional. 6l/100km is 50% better than 9l/100km. 30mpg vs 20mpg is... not as simple.