Gallons of Fuel vs. Miles per Gallon

I would love it if my trip odometer showed me how many gallons it took, instead of MPG. Gallons can be easily converted into dollars, or impact on my budget.

 

I agree that mpg leads to idiocy like this: Tested: Speed vs. Fuel Economy - MSN Autos.

I think lphkm is expecting too much but I will join your gphm campaign.

From now on quote your mileage in gphm. You may also provide mileage in lphkm in order to help Canadians.*

We need a decimal places convention. I suggest 3 so you can claim it's as American as baseball.

Last year I got 1.887 gphm (4.438 lphkm).

* Of course, it's really to encourage use of the metric system but let's not tell other Americans** that.
** Disclosure: I am an alien but I might turn into an American in a few years.

 

That's a good start.

Since the US is the one saddled with using the "US Customary" system of units we should follow the NIST United States Customary units of measurement and their standard abbreviations. We should also use mathematical symbols instead p for / etc.

Trivia: The US Customary system is based on the pre-Imperial system and so it is older than the new fangled 19th century "Imperial" system that the louts in Britain invented so their beer pints would be bigger.

Let's express US fuel consumption in gal/100mi

 

OK, gal/100mi it is.

I think we (UK) went Imperial because life wasn't confusing enough. We had a completely screwed up currency and distance measurement so having the same size for dry and liquid measures was far too easy.

 

I would rather credit our UK cousins with being crafty enough switch to Imperial to get bigger pints of beer.:rockon:

 

This is yet another benefit of having a ScanGauge. It can show gallons used (current trip segment, today, tank), cost per mile, or trip cost.

 

I use hogshead per furlong.

Tom

 

Tom, I am enthusiastically awaiting the arrival of my Scangauge this week. Please provide the requisite values to be programmed into the TXD, RXF, RXD, and MTH fields for accurate hogshead per furlong reading. Can Scangauge store the XGauge as hogshead/100 furlong instead? I think that would be easier to read. Thanks.

 

I started mentioning this, too. To me it helps illustrate how much of a fight the EV cars have from an operating perspective. Going from 50->100 MPG saves HALF the fuel that was saved going from 25->50. You cannot save what you don't use. You save more gas going from 25->50 mpg than you do going from 50 mpg to 15000 mpg. The EVs have an equivalent cost of 75 or 100 mpg. It just doesn't really save much money--or fuel.

Good God.

 

I prefer "hogshead / 10,000 furlong". That eliminates the need for all those ugly decimal places or scientific notation.

 

I think what you are looking for is often called "wood gas". Take a look at this link:

[ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas]Wood gas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

Tom

 

That's always a good rule of thumb.

 

Hogs have fur?

 

This link shows the new window stickers under consideration for MY2012 vehicles. It pretty much is going to cover most of the points brought up here. The next revision may show the Hogshead factor.

http://www.epa.gov/fueleconomy/label/420f10048.pdf

 

Fascinating topic.

What is the history behind the US use of MPG, and how pervasive is this measurement method throughout the world? How did Europe come up with their method? Who started it?

 

It is a very old measure of efficiency. MPG is used in US and UK (imperial gallons), and the metric km/liter is used in many countries including the Netherlands and much of Asia and Africa. Others use km/100 liter a measure of consumption. The advantage of fuel efficiency is the ability to easily calculate range. I have 10 gallons usable before my reserve and I think I get 50 mpg I can go 500 miles before filling up. This was more important when gas stations were further spread out and trip computers non-existant. The advantage of the consumption figure is that people seem to use it more intuitively about how much fuel they are actually saving.