My car consistently gets 50 mpg - more if I drive slower. On the highway, whether my car is loaded to the hilt, it still gets at least 1000km’s to a tank. Now, when we drove from Mackenzie down to San Francisco, across to Minneapolis and back (in two weeks but only 10 days of driving - just shy of 11,000km total) our mileage went down to about half of normal - just over 500km to a tank (capacity is 55L, but I’ve never gotten more than 52 in it)…oh but wait - we were so enamored with the incredible interstates that we locked the cruise control at 160km/h - the radar detector paid for itself on that trip alone.
Anyways - the whole point of the post is that my car is diesel and gets great mileage - now you may have noticed the price of diesel has been higher than gas lately. But for me, until gas is twice as much as diesel - I won’t complain too loudly, since my car outdoes a lot of the gas vehicles on the road (yes, I am aware of the smart cars, honda fits - smaller versions that claim to be as fuel efficient - I only say ‘claim’ because I don’t have first hand experience on driving them, not because I am implying the ads are false). Even when (because it’s not just an ‘if’, I believe it’s a ‘when’) diesel prices finally get twice as high as gas, I can still rest easy in knowing my car will see 500,000km’s minimum in its’ lifetime. But the really great thing is that so many cars on the road today will do exactly that - especially if they are well maintained - diesel vs gas is fairly minor.
There’s a very easy way to convert it. Just go to Google, and enter the following:
XX mpg in l/km
So for example, if the car’s fuel efficiency is listed as 65 mpg, you would enter "65 mpg in km/l and you would get “65 miles per gallon = 0.036186859 リットル / km”
You can actually use Google’s search to make any kind of conversion. Not just between imperial and metric, but it will even do nautical measurements, obsolete measurements (e.g., spans, cubits), and even currency conversions.
All you have to do is enter the measurement you have, then type “in” followed by the unit you want to convert it to. You can use either the full word or abbreviations. So for example, if you see a temperature given in the U.S. in Fahrenheit and you want to see it in Celsius, just enter “70 F in C” and it will give you the answer. Give it a try!
Going from 12 mpg to 15 mpg saves the same amount of fuel as going from 30 to 40 mpg. So there’s no question that a higher mpg value is better, a small increase at the low end of the scale should not be ignored. Whereas if you express it in gpm or l/100km or whatever, it’s easier to make comparisons.
Well - I managed to go 160kph on the interstates without wrecking the car on frost heaves or potholes. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying that the roads are perfect there - but compared to roads where you can’t do the speed limit in parts, they seem like heaven.