Posted on 07/13/2010 8:04:34 AM PDT by Sub-Driver
Drop 'miles per gallon' as fuel measure, says US National Research Council
The US National Research Council has said that "miles per gallon" should not be used on its own in measuring a car's fuel use, backing a green motorist's group which called the measure "stupid".
By Tom Chivers Published: 2:57PM BST 13 Jul 2010
The NRC said that the measure caused consumers to overestimate the importance of changes at high miles-per-gallon (mpg) values, and underestimate it at small ones. Particularly, it says: "Fuel economy data cause consumers to undervalue small increases (1-4 mpg) in fuel economy for vehicles in the 15-30 mpg range."
The panel urged that fuel use be displayed as fuel consumed - perhaps as volume of fuel used per 100 miles - alongside the traditional miles-per-gallon measure. This standard is used already in Europe, with fuel use being given in terms of litres used per 100 kilometres travelled.
An environmental motoring website, GreenCarReports.com, welcomed the move, saying that it had been calling for the change for over a year and describing the mpg measure as "stupid". It asks the question: "Do you save more gasoline by going from 10 to 20 mpg, or going from 33 to 50 mpg?"
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
“I say run over it.” LOL
When I’m towing our Airstream with my Tundra CrewMax, I make a point to blow their doors off..... at about 11 mpg.
When at gas stations and when an obvious lib is within earshot, I tell my wife, loudly, how excited I am about the potential of gas reaching $6 to $8 a gallon, because there will be far less traffic to contend with, more gas for us to use, and the campgrounds and resorts won’t be as crowded.
You should see the hate looks I get... it’s fun and I know it ruins their day.
...and while we’re at it, we should calibrate speedometers to read in “roods per fortnight”.
Then we can raise speed limits by several orders of magnitude.
Pottles per league
What abuse would that be?? The wife's Toyota Corolla has about 100 mile/day put on it (five day work week). It's coming up on 50,000 miles, and the gas mileage is still about 39.7 mpg (actually up a bit from showroom new mileage).
Miles per gallon is a measure of distance travelled per gallon, genius!
They're always looking for a new, better, longer wrench on people's heads.
They want people to kiss their ass and tell them it smells like roses -- as Lyndon Johnson once said of someone being discussed for an appointment.
And then pay for the privilege -- after catching the Greenies' lunch tab.
Maybe Newtons of force applied per second derived from each Milli-Liter of gas burned at standard atmospheric pressure at sea level.
Consumers can convert to the form that best suits them and polish up on their math skills at the same time!
“Changing it makes sense. Distance traveled per gallon is more meaningful and provides a better comparison. Why the resistance?”
Exactly. Miles per gallon.
By the way, going from 10-20 mpg is the answer.
No they don't.
Problem with that is how do you estimate it? Gas prices vary dramatically by location and by time. It might be $2.49 at the place across the street, and $2.39 3 blocks away but next week there won’t be anyplace in town that’s under $2.50 and if you go two towns over hope you didn’t need lunch because all your money is going in the gas tank.
MPG really is the best measurement. If they were going to make a change I’d say they should add tank size and miles per tank. That’s really how the consumer interacts with their gas tank, they fill it up, run it almost dry and fill it up again.
I agree. There's seems to be a certain strain of conservative that simply reacts against all change. I'm tempted to believe it's a kind of cowardice.
Maybe that cowardice is what is behind conservatives overall lack of action once they control congress. Health savings accounts, for example, could have been implemented back in '96 as an answer to Hillarycare. The idea has been around for a while.
Instead, conservatives were afraid to try something new and now we have Obamacare.
Political conservatism works -- as long as it isn't conservatively applied.
Ton-miles per gallon might be the best indicator of fuel efficiency of all. I’ll bet some full-sized pickup trucks would actually grade out very high under that kind of standard!
“Do you save more gasoline by going from 10 to 20 mpg, or going from 33 to 50 mpg?”
Consuming one tank of gas, you save no gasoline by going from 10 to 20 mpg; but you do travel twice as far. MPG is a more intuitive measure of bang for your buck.
Since when is a “Hundred Kilometer” a unit of measure?
If they want to talk liters per kilometer, well, that makes sense. Or maybe milliliters per kilometer, if they want to deal with intergers.
Thirty MPG would be 12.75 km/liter or 78 milliliters per kilometer.
I don’t know of any public school where they teach that pi=3 and I think you are either misinformed or making it up. The Bible, on the other hand states, “And he [Hiram] made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one rim to the other it was round all about, and...a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about...” In other words, pi=3. Who are you going to believe?
I've lived in both. Both are accurate, and both are easy to calculate in your head.
The article is talking about this as a relative representation of fuel consumption. As it says, going 10 to 20 mpg doesn't look like you save as much as going from 33 to 50 mpg. After all, one gives you 10 mpg and the other gives you 17 mpg. Most people do fail that little test.
The other way makes consumption comparisons more intuitive. Let's restate it with the equivalents. Instead of 10-20 mpg, you go from 24 l/100km to 12 l/100km. The number cut in half, so it's obvious your fuel consumption gets cut in half. Now go from 33-50 mpg, which is 7 l/100km to 5 l/100km. The number goes a bit lower, so it's obvious you're just getting somewhat better mileage, not as big an improvement as in the first case. The confusion of the mpg system isn't there.
The reason is simple. Our mpg system is based on "how far you can go," while the other is based on "how much you use." Even though either can be flipped to calculate the other way, the volume/distance measure makes the results of "how much you use" calculations more obvious and intuitive.
It doesn't matter, as long as the gallons feel good about themselves.
If you are going to a consumption measure, I like ml/km.
The very worst cars would consume about 250 ml/km, where as the best would consume about 50 ml/km. That gives you a 200 unit range, which is good for discriminating numbers. You don’t have to deal with a lot of fractions to get good resolution over 200 units.
The diffrerence is in measuring consumption as opposed to milage.
MPG is a “positive” figure. The bigger it is, the better off you are. This fits well with a generally positive and optimistic outlook on life, so it is favored by Americans.
Liters per 100 kilometers is a “negative” figure. The higher it is, the worse off you are. It fits well with a mind-set that consumption is bad, and that life should be about lowering consumption rather than maximizing wealth. That is why this measure is favored by Europeans and enviro-weenies of all stripes.
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