Quote:
Originally Posted by rousseau
Quick, without thinking about it, how would you say that a car is easier on the wallet at the gas pump?
<Timer begins, seconds ticking off clock...>
Okay, time's up. Here are four options I can think of:
- It gets good gas mileage
- It's easy on gas
- It gets good fuel economy
- It's fuel efficient
Having been a kid in the 70s and 80s, the first and second options sound the most conventional to me, while the third and fourth seem more like marketing speak, like something you'd see in an advertisement but would think sounded stilted and formal in casual speech.
However, I've recently encountered two people in their late twenties/early thirties who used the expression "it gets good fuel economy." Is this due to metric impinging semantically on the term "mileage"? Because I think that's the reason that I myself hesitate when the topic of fuel consumption in automobiles comes up. The term "gas mileage" is still instinctual to me, but it doesn't seem appropriate anymore. So I tend to say "easier on gas."
Speaking of which, when did "litres per 100 km" become standard usage on dashboards? Was it right at the beginning, when cars first started having this gauge as an option in the display? Do cars sold in the US show "gallons per 100 miles," or do they show "miles per gallon"?
What interests me, is that it seems that at some point someone in the car industry figured that "kilometres per litre" was too cumbersome as a conversion from Imperial, and went with "L/100 km" instead. Though with this it seems that, once again, you bump up against a particularly Canadian trait: the relative paucity of elision, abbreviation and slang in our speech, and the seeming willingness to wanly pronounce things out in full. Because I've only ever heard people say something like "my car does 9 litres per 100 kilometers" when talking about their gas mile...I mean fuel efficiency.
Is there a slangy short form for "L per 100 km"? If not, instead of Canadian boringness, could a possible explanation for that be the waning interest in cars in younger generations in general, given that they're the ones who tend to come up with speech innovations?
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I would probably use the term "fuel mileage", which is also now archaic. I sometimes think the conversion to metric was useless in some areas of common usage, and I have no trouble relating to speed in km., but the concept of MPG was simpler and easier to remember. There may or may not be a word "kilometerage" as in kilometerage of the car's odometer, kilometers per litre, and it's just too hard to say. However, the dislike of this measurement for me came with the reversal of the concept (quantity per distance, vs. distance per quantity), meaning the lower number is now preferable instead of the higher number. The common abbreviation is L/100km. Blame the Americans for propagating the confusion, they should walk a kilometer on our feet, give 'em a centimeter and they'll take a kilometer.
Now it will get even more confusing with EVs, the new standard is "MPGe", or "the distance a car can travel on 33.7kWh of electricity," simple eh?
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