Hey metric system people...

[Timsup2nothin]

I have this curious question that just came up. I was talking to someone about their new car, and since they commute pretty far how efficient it is was naturally an issue. We also talked about the value of the car they traded in, and of course there is metered wear and tear involved.

Obviously, being backwards Americans and not metricasificated, when we talked about how efficient the new car is we talked about gas mileage.

And since we aren't metrifactionalitated here in our benighted land when we were talking about wear and tear and value there was mention of the mileage on the odometer.

So, if we had been properly metricalifragilized would there be a different common usage word than mileage in either of those instances?

 

[FriendlyFire]

We look at the number of Kms the cars run (instead of Miles)
So a used car with be advertised with X number of Kms, and we basically say how many KM is on this car.
This Toyota 2014 has 100,000km on it

 

[Gori the Grey]

So, kilometrage?

 

[Timsup2nothin]

We look at the number of Kms the cars run (instead of Miles)
So a used car with be advertised with X number of Kms, and we basically say how many KM is on this car.
This Toyota 2014 has 100,000km on it

Yeah, we might say "oh it has sixty thousand miles on it," but "what's the mileage?" is a much more common form than "how many miles are on it?" even though both are obviously acceptable. So, there is no equivalent form for kilometers, then?

 

[Synobun]

It's still called mileage in Canada.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

It's still called mileage in Canada.

Yes. Even though the actual figure is expressed in kilometers, the term "mileage" has persisted.

Also, to answer Tim's earlier post, the gas "mileage" of a car is measured in liters per 100 kilometers. So looking at a new car, the manufacturer will put something like "7.9L/100 km" on the sticker to show its efficiency. That example is a gas hog, btw.

 

[Zelig]

I work for a large exclusively metric automotive-related company with several tens of thousands of active vehicles on the books - we refer to it as "fuel economy".

I do the same in my day-to-day speech.

I've also been pushing for a conversion to megametres for common odometer and maintenance interval readings, but it's not catching on so well.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

In terms of verbal efficiency "fuel economy" compared to "mileage" is not very economical.

 

[Perfection]

To be fair though "mileage" is ambiguous in either referring to vehicle lifetime or fuel economy.

 

[Omega124]

Theoretically, just as Vincour points out, there is no reason why we have to switch out the world mileage in the hypothetical scenario where we used metric. Language is extremely arbitrary and there is a lot of legacy terms and phrases that exist in language that have no relation to reality itself. Phones have buttons now, but we still dial it. We use CDs and are even starting to switch into digital-only music distribution, but the companies that produce music are still called record labels. And for a more directly related example, imperial's unit of measuring weight is a pound, but we still use lbs as an abbrevation for it as if we were still using the Latin libra.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Phones have buttons now, but we still dial it.

In fact, the computers we carry around in our pockets, we still call phones.

 

[Omega124]

In fact, the computers we carry around in our pockets, we still call phones.

A fair point! The distinction between (smart)phone and computer has certainly blurred in the past few years, as more advanced OSes have been rolled out. After all, desktop computers can certainly use landlines to make both literal calls and "calls" (as in, dial-up), so its not like the literal phone aspect of a smartphone meaningfully differentiates them.

 

[Zelig]

In terms of verbal efficiency "fuel economy" compared to "mileage" is not very economical.

You can shorten it to "what's the economy of your car?" Or I guess just "econ" would work, but I've never heard that one.

 

[Camikaze]

I had assumed 'mileage' universally referred simply to the odometer reading on a car. That's what it means here. For describing the fuel efficiency of the car, it's 'economy'.

 

[Old Hippy]

In terms of verbal efficiency "fuel economy" compared to "mileage" is not very economical.

''what's the mileage on your car''
''160,000 miles''
''no how many miles per gallon does it get''
''Oh that would be about 23.6 miles a gallon''

the verbal efficiency of a word having two meanings

 

[Timsup2nothin]

To be fair, in the USA the only time people talk about mileage, as in fuel usage rates, is when they have or are looking at a new car, and what they really mean is the EPA rated estimated mileage as indicated on the MSRP sticker. I doubt that there are more than a handful of people within a hundred miles of me (encompassing about thirty million people) that have the first clue what their actual mileage (of that variety) is.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

In Spain for fuel usage rate we talk about litres consumpted every 100 km, (we say "litros a los cien" or simply "consumo"). Same for France or Italy. Odometer distance is "kilometraje". I would like to know how is it said in Germany and other not latin metrical countries though.

 

[r16]

"How much does it burn?" is the thing used in Turkish . Kilometers alone work for the distance travelled .

 

[red_elk]

In Spain for fuel usage rate we talk about litres consumpted every 100 km, (we say "litros a los cien" or simply "consumo"). Same for France or Italy. Odometer distance is "kilometraje". I would like to know how is it said in Germany and other not latin metrical countries though.

In Russia, colloquial term for car mileage is "Пробег" which means distance traveled.
There is no word mileage, but sometimes the word kilometrage is used. I think this is true for most countries which use metric system.

Edit: From imperial units, we only use inches for screen size and DPI for resolution.

 

[Mise]

The UK is weird in that it still uses imperial for distance and fuel, even though it commonly uses metric for most other things.

There's no reason that "mileage" couldn't be used, even when the number is actually km or km/l (or l/km, which is a more useful metric in many instances).