As I said before, it's probably because km/L (or the godawful mpg, even) works better when you fill your tank every time you go to the gas station -- for it answers the question: "How far can I go on this tank before I have to fill up again?"
For that purpose, L/100 km IS doing it backwards. Carleton In a message dated Mon, 01 Jul 2002 17:05:20 +0100, Markus Kuhn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >Brian J White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> I think km per liter would >> have been a much better choice than liters per 100km. > >There seems to be a tradition in the US marketing world, to use >reciprocal units in order to ensure that a higher number means better. I >would be curious if you have any reference for where/when this practice >originated historically. > >Fuel consumption, that is volume or mass per distance would be the most >natural quantity to describe efficiency of a car, but a lower figure >means better, so its reciprocal value "mileage" was used instead in the >US. > >Similar, for printer resolution, pixel size in micrometers would be the >technically most natural specification of length, but smaller means >better, so we ended up with reciprocal length (dots per inch) in the US >marketing literature. German phototypesetters used to have a resolution >of 10 �m, these days they are advertised to have 2540 dpi ... :-( > >In very recent products this trend is sometimes broken. Examples are the >gate width quoted to characterize a semiconductor process (The Pentium4 >is produced in 0.13 �m technology) and mask pitch of color CRT monitors >(mine here has 0.22 mm). It seems that in the computer industry people >are more comfortable with the idea that smaller is better, even in >advertised quantities. > >Markus > >-- >Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK >Email: mkuhn at acm.org, �WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> > >
