Back to MPH?

Steve · 13-09-2007 11:01am

Slow coach wrote:

And this is why metric was introduced in the first place! It's all very well having miles and feet and pints and gallons, but if they're non-standardised then where do we stand?

I was looking at an old map recently (on the wall of a pub in west cork somewhere). I think it was from around 1800's sometime - can't be sure.

The interesting bit was the scale on the bottom had English miles and Irish miles on it - the Irish mile looked about 20% longer than the English one!
Don't think km's had beed invented yet.

Maybe we should revert to these

Steve · 13-09-2007 11:09am

E92 wrote:

if a car does 1 litre per 100 km or 50 it means nothing to me, whereas I know that 50 mpg is good, and 10 mpg is piss poor.

OK the relative meaning of "1 litre per 100 km or 50" is meaningless - that's just because you aren't familiar with what figures are good and what aren't - personally if someone asked what mpg i'm getting I'd have to say I don't know - even if I did know the figures mean SFA to me.
What I do know is that I can get x amount of km's for y litres of fuel. If I'm going on a long run e.g. Dub-Cork, I know how many km's it is from the signposts and I then know how many litres of fuel to expect to use.

BTW as for l/km figures - haven't a clue what's good or bad either:D

sesswhat · 13-09-2007 2:44pm

E92 wrote:

Why can't the metric people use kilometres per litre? As least there would be some sort of sensible(and presumably easy) conversion, just as there is for mph and km/h. I mean a gallon is about 4.5 litres, and a mile is about 1.6 km, so why cant people who use metric for fuel economy use km/l?(I've seen BMWs on youtube which have speedos in km/h and fuel economy meters in km/l, so why not?)

It would have been just too sensible. (These people are descended from the ones who also came up with the imperial system. They had 8 fingers on one hand and 14 on the other and based their counting systems on this.)

If your fuel consumption is 16.8 you don't have to worry which scale to use;)

Pherekydes · 13-09-2007 3:01pm

sesswhat wrote:

If your fuel consumption is 16.8 you don't have to worry which scale to use;)

Good one!

zilog_jones · 13-09-2007 4:22pm

I think the conversion from MPH to km/h was justified here as Irish road signs had already been in some half-assed conversion limbo for as long as I can remember (I'm 22) having distances all in kilometres but speeds in miles.

In the UK they're still all imperial, and the cost of changing all the road signs over there would be even more ridiculous.

E92 · 13-09-2007 5:28pm

sesswhat wrote:

If your fuel consumption is 16.8 you don't have to worry which scale to use;)

Is that because 16.8 mpg is 16.8 l/100km? I know that 10 l/100km is 10 km/l, so multiply by 4.5 and divide by 1.6 and you get 28.1 mpg. Is that correct?

And by a similar reasoning 5 l/100km = 20 km/l=56.2 mpg?

I'm lucky I'm good at Maths, so I did that in my head, but unless they are easy numbers to work with like those ones, converting is simply too complicated unless you have a calculator.

I think I'll stick to mpg for another while

MercMad · 14-09-2007 10:19am

I never bother with all that................actually knowing what mpg / L-100Km you car does....doesn't improve it either way..............so I dont bother !

I couldn't take the shock !!

Back to MPH?

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