It's more like once it's established it's hard to change - if you started listing 'miles per litre' that would be like it was 'designed to hide the cost of driving', because I would have no idea how that compared.
(Quite normally for my age in the UK I think, I'm familiar with both metric & Imperial measurements, but generally fairly bad at converting. Except I know 568ml = 1 (UK! Not US!) pint - for which I can thank my alma mater Imperial and its student bars: Metric, and FiveSixEight. I could probably guess effectively at lbs and kg from butter/flour. Of course I know 2.54cm = 1". A yard is 'a bit' less than 1m. It's the bigger ones that seem more obscure/are harder to work out from familiarity I suppose.)
> It's more like once it's established it's hard to change - if you started listing 'miles per litre' that would be like it was 'designed to hide the cost of driving', because I would have no idea how that compared.
1. I think with liters, people typically reverse the relationship so it's liters/100km. Which is a much more intuitive unit.
2. If you're buying gas in liters, I think it'd be a lot easier to switch over to using liters for efficiency. You may not be able to compare easily to other vehicles, but you'd be able to estimate your personal fuel more easily.
I think it's the other way around. Distance per quantity of fuel is the intuitive measurement that humans understand and can relate directly to how much fuel they purchase. It could be argued that it is less intuitive when comparing two cars, however. Although better MPG is still strictly better, which is about the level of detail most non-nerds care about.
(Quite normally for my age in the UK I think, I'm familiar with both metric & Imperial measurements, but generally fairly bad at converting. Except I know 568ml = 1 (UK! Not US!) pint - for which I can thank my alma mater Imperial and its student bars: Metric, and FiveSixEight. I could probably guess effectively at lbs and kg from butter/flour. Of course I know 2.54cm = 1". A yard is 'a bit' less than 1m. It's the bigger ones that seem more obscure/are harder to work out from familiarity I suppose.)