Good Magazine has an interesting article about how we’d think differently about fuel consumption if we referenced gallons-per-mile instead of miles-per-gallon. How much gas do you use to go a mile? 10 miles? 100 miles? It’s fractional on the level of a tank of gas, but when you scale the numbers up it becomes easier to comprehend. Professor Richard Larrick bases fuel consumption against 10,000 miles.

The key thing about 10,000 miles is that is the distance that many people drive in a year. In fact, they often drive more. It really gives you a sense of, Okay, a year’s worth of driving is going to use 400 gallons, or 700 gallons.

The math makes the change of reference interesting:

This helps us understand that pulling cars out of the teens [in terms
of miles per gallon] is so much more valuable than pushing an efficient
car even higher. That only becomes clear when you start thinking about
gallons per mile. That tiny increase from 10 mpg  to 11 mpg saves
essentially the same one gallon of gas every 100 miles as does
increasing 33 mpg to 50 mpg.