Yesterday I was driving home from work when a car commercial came on the radio. They were promoting various models of Kia cars. Their big "claim to fame" was how fuel efficient the cars are. But they promoted it by saying how many miles per gallon the various models can get.
Miles per gallon! Canada switched road signs to metric in 1977 and gasoline sales switched to metric in 1981. It's now 2008. I have no idea what a good miles per gallon number is an no one under the age of 50 should. Even those over 50 have had lots of time to get used to the "new" system. And I don't care enough to do the conversion.
So, Kia, if you want to communicate with anyone born since 1960, may I suggest switching to the metric system? It's pretty cool. Everything is divisible by 10 :)
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4 comments:
LOL All car efficiency values are measured in MPG Vicky . . . not just Kia's. So that message could be universal for the transportation industry!
A follow up tidbit from Wikipedia....
Fuel economy for new vehicles is published by Transport Canada in litres per 100 kilometres but window stickers in dealer showrooms include "miles per imperial gallon" conversions even though neither of these units has been used in fuel sales or road signs in three decades.
Oh, one more note, when buying motorcycles we talked about gas tank size in litres and fuel efficiency in number of kms you can get out of one tank of gas. So I guess it's just cars/trucks that are the issue.
I like knowing the MPG, simply because that's still so commonly discussed (like body weight in lbs. and height in ft. and ins.), so I can easily compare what's good and not. I'm not comfortable enough yet with litres/100km to hear a number and just know how good it is. That said, I think all window stickers should provide both numbers. Eventually, we might all move to the metric measurement, just as we might start referring to our heights and weights in metric. But it's gonna take a while!
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