How is distance per unit of fuel calculated in countries that use the metric system? Meters per liter? Kilometers per liter? Is there a word for it (kilometerage?)?
“Kilometreage” for a joke*. Otherswise, “mileage” or "fuel consumption.
*Living in a metric country which converted within the living memory of many people (60s), a lot of cheap humour is had by converting famous songs, poems, and the like, such as:
Eight hundred and four point six seven kilometres,
Eight hundred and four point six seven kilometres.
You can hear the whistle blow
Eight hundred and four point six seven kilometres.
The standard metric measure of fuel efficiency is litres per 100 kms i.e. a lower number is better.
I don’t think I’ve come across the term “kilometrage”. People usually talk about “fuel efficiency”, or simply “how many kilometres can I do on a tank’s worth of petrol”.
Related to the “mileage” term: I don’t know how it is in other ‘metric’ countries but the English-language (esp. American, it seems) habit of referring to physical quantities as “unitage” looks somewhat unusual to me (and always makes me uneasy when translating documentation into English - “voltage” just doesn’t look adult to me even if I know it is correct.). In Germany we get told in school physics at an early point (5th form IIRRC) to always keep physical quantity and unit separate, conceptually and terminologically.
Hence:
unit: Volt but quantity: electrical tension
unit: Ampere but quantity: electrical current
unit: Watt but quantity: power
unit: Joule but quantity: energy
unit: metre but quantity: length, or distance
unit: square metre (or hectare) but quantity: area
The physics teachers always corrected us at once if we were talking about “how many units” rather than “how much physical quantity”.
Here in Israel it’s kilometrage (pronounced “keelometRAZH”). I’m pretty sure it’s a loan from the French.
I’ve always just called it mileage. I think mileage has become a word in its own right, distinct from specifically “miles per gallon”.
We just call it mileage in Australia. Or fuel efficiency. I’ve never heard “kilometrage” in my life.
We call it mileage - but then as we still measure distances in miles that’s not much of a surprise. However, we don’t buy petrol by the gallon but still refer to MPG. Just coz people have learned what good mileage is in MPG, rather than MPL or whatever, I imagine.
Agreed. It’s more a concept than a literalism, like “hard yards” and probably lots of others. Though I believe “centimetre perfect” has some tongue-in-cheek currency in AFL circles.
So it seems that, dependent upon country, YKMV.
Second this. In Canada, you’ll see L/100km, though some people still talk in mpg.
And just by sheer coincidence, I happen to have a calculator which converts miles per gallon(US) to miles per gallon (UK) to kilometers per liter to liters per 100 kilometers.
Typically – in Canada – we still use mileage, and talk in miles per gallon (Imperial). But the car makers and media report in litres per 100 Kms. I have a Jeep Grand Cherokee that computes mileage in US gallons, and in litres per 100 Kms. I use the US gallon system, and convert to imperial (X5/4) in my head.
People of my middle-aged group have mastered temperature conversion and can speak fluently in both Farenheit and Celsius, but we cling to pounds, inches, miles, etc. for everyday speak. Oh, and we NEVER use meters on golf courses.
I always ask myself how the heck this type of ratio as a means of measurement came about. It’s certainly much harder to visualize, at least for me. Why not km/L? What’s wrong with saying that you get 12km of use out of 1 liter of gasoline? That’s useful information that you can talk about in every day situations. But to say that you get 11.2L/100km isn’t intuitive, unless you’re driving 100km all the time.
So you’re saying you allways use a full gallon of gasoline? I find it very intuitive as I can merely multiply the fuel consuption number by the numbers of km I’m to be driving, and move the comma (since that’s the decimal marker in Norway) two places (well, actually one place, since we Norwegian still operate with l/mil, ‘mil’ being the Norwegian ‘metric mile’ equaling 10km) and I’ll know how much I’m ‘supposed’ to need.
Miles per gallon, or km per liter, might be just as easy to use, but it’s definitely not intuitive.
Klickage! 
Or, conversely, clickage. :rolleyes:
Sorry for the slight hijack, but how widely used is that ‘mil’? Will one e. g. find it on road signs, too?
Which is a meaningless figure unless you include how big the tank is. This ploy was used by US manufacturers in the late seventies and early eighties by quoting the range a car could travel on a tank of gas. In virtually all cases the car got horrible fuel economy but had an enormous tank, usually well over 20 gallons.
So, really, you kind of agree with me. I’d have no problem with 0.112L/km, either. Why bother expressing it as 100km?