TIMtheTOON

More useless non-news from the front page of Yahoo! Report: U.S. drivers should think in gallons per mile.

No, they shouldn’t. Because it’s a ratio. Whether it’s ten miles for one gallon of gas, or a 1/10th of a gallon for one mile, it’s still the same goddam thing — nevermind that if your car gets 10 miles to the gallon, it better be a Greyhound bus. But Richard Larrick, a management professor (note: not a mathematics professor) at Duke University claims that:

“The reality that few people appreciate is that improving fuel efficiency from 10 to 20 miles per gallon is actually a more significant savings than improving from 25 to 50 miles per gallon for the same distance of driving,”

Improving fuel efficiency by 100% is the same no matter what — if there’s indeed a “math illusion” at work here as he claims in the article, it is very elusive indeed.

I think what he means is gaining 5 miles per gallon when your car only gets 20 is a bigger improvement than if your car already gets 40 miles to the gallon, but… oh wait, I was able to figure that out using the existing miles/gallon ratio. Remind me again why we need this new measurement?

Ultimately there are some funny discrepancies in math, like increasing 100 to 150 is a 50% increase, while decreasing 150 to 100 is a 1/3 decrease, but simply flipping the units in the ratio between miles and gallons does not mean you’re magically going to see an improvement in fuel efficiency. GPM is an utterly redundant marketing ploy, because you’re still paying $1 for 0.23 gallons of gas.