Rant and a poll: measuring fuel economy, American vs. the European way

October 13, 12:41 AMAuto Review ExaminerJohn Matras

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Miles per gallon or liters per 100 kilometers. That’s the way fuel economy is measured on our side of the Atlantic and on the Continent. Ostensibly they measure the same thing: how efficient an automobile is in the use of fuel. And on the surface, that’s correct, although there’s a more subtle difference in how economy is measured here and how it is measured there.

Or at least we think so.

The European measure, as it says, tells a driver how much fuel it takes to go a given distance. Have a trip of a 100 kilometers? Well, if you know how much fuel is in your car’s tank, you’ll know whether you’ll get there or be parked on the side of the Autobahn with your fuel gauge pegged on empty. Or whether you best fuel up before hitting the road. It makes sense in a territorially constrained Europe where, for example, one can drive from the west coast of Sweden to the east coast in a matter of hours, or where entire countries are smaller than some states.

The United States, however, is almost by definition a land of adventurers, people who packed a suitcase and left their ancestral home of centuries. These were people who looked at what they had and said, well, ja sure, how far can I go with it? What else could one expect from a land of manifest destiny than to measure miles per gallon, the distance one can go with what one has in the tank?

Americans are different from their European cousins, and the way we measure fuel economy is only one measure how.

P.S.: Next time we’ll discuss how the metric system was invented by the same people who popularized the guillotine. In the meantime, take our poll and tell us what you think.