gallons consumed per 10,000 miles?

[RningOnFumes]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/ma...2-B-t-005.html

As gas prices rose earlier this year, consumers started paying a lot more attention to their cars’ miles per gallon. Good luck with that. The apparently simple unit of measurement is a highly misleading one, as two Duke management professors demonstrated in a June issue of Science. They favor an alternative measure of fuel economy: gallons consumed per 10,000 miles.

[thaharlequin]

Why not? The average driver is at ~10,000-15,000 miles per year, so it gives a decent estimate as to fuel costs per year w/ a nice round number. It also illustrates how much someone can save. For instance going from 10-15mpg doesn't sound like as much of a difference as going from 30mpg to 60mpg, but over 10,000 miles the smaller difference numerically would result in 333.3 gallons of fuel saved, as opposed to the larger difference at 166.6 gallons saved. It's an easier way for people to visualize and relate to the cost of gasoline.

[toyomoho]

Good point on incremental savings after say 20 MPG vrs jumping from 10 to 20 MPG.

[thaharlequin]

Europe measures fuel economy like that. For instance a car that gets ~80mpg wold get ~3L/100km and one that gets ~240mpg, ~1L/100km, so it's easy to see that going w/ crazy high mileage doesn't save a whole lot of fuel compared to going from 20L/100km to 10L/100km.