Can you solve Seth Godin's math problem?

Re:Can you solve Seth Godin's math problem? by jws on Saturday August 22, 2009 @03:41PM (#779711)

If we americans worked in gallons/mile instead these sorts of decisions would be obvious and intuitive. No one goes out with the goal of burning a gallon of gas so measuring how many miles you can go by burning one is silly. mpg is the reciprocal of what they want and people are bad at reciprocals.

I fixed his problem below:

  Suburbans: 23.5 liter/100km
  Priuseses:  4.7 liter/100km

  Suburban+: 18.0 liter/100km (save 5.5 liters)
  PriusPlus:  2.3 liter/100lm (save 2.4 liters)

  Would you rather save, 5.5 liters or 2.4 liters?

(And you don't have to "go metric", just using gallons/1000miles would do fine.)

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Re:Can you solve Seth Godin's math problem? by 3pt14159 on Saturday August 22, 2009 @10:36PM (#780093)

I live in Canada where we typically get both mpg and liter/100 km. I've found that, almost universally, my friends that report mpg have less fuel efficient cars than the ones that quote liters per 100 km when asked about a vehicle's fuel efficiency.

I tend to think that one of the reasons that Americans tend to have less fuel efficient cars is that when they are evaluating alternatives 9 mpg and 10 mpg are "closer" or more equivalent than 47 mpg and 50 mpg. For example, if I go out and buy a Truck in Canada I could either compare

Ford F150: 15.7 liters/100km (15 mpg) city, 11.2 liters/100km (21 mpg) highway.

GMC Sierra 2500 4WD: 14.7 liters/100km (16 mpg) city, 11.76 liters/100km (20 mpg) highway.

With the Sierra, you are using a full liter less of gas during city driving at the cost of only half a liter of highway driving, so unless I'm doing more than 66% of my driving on highway like conditions, I should go with the Sierra, but that information does not come across to gas conscious buyers that use mpg.

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