9-5 gas mileage?

True! But I still think their collective heart is in the right place.

--=20 Regards, Peter Wilkins

Thanks for that info. I have a friend visiting Ireland next week and have passed on that info and url to her. Wouldn't want her to get booked for speeding!

--=20 Regards, Peter Wilkins

That's a pretty interesting theory, and I don't doubt it works on a small scale, but I'm not sure I trust all drivers enough to implement the thing on a big scale. Personal responsibility and courtesy to others are traits that are not as common as they should be.

Either way, I was thinking about distances on exit signs and things like that. In some states where some thought actually went into the highway system (e.g. Maryland and Virginia but definitely not Massachusetts), the exit number corresponds to the miles from the start of the highway (e.g. exit 42 is 42 miles from the start of the road). This is useful when you want to add an exit because you don't end up with goofy things like exit

23C not really related to the existing exits 23A and 23B. Such a nice system would be broken if you switched to kilometers. On the other hand, I'm willing to bet a lot of people don't realize the exits are numbered that way for a reason.

Maybe, but car manufacturers wouldn't pass on the savings anyway.

I thought the distance indication on US road signs was in minutes to get there (at 60 Mi/h). That would change too if they'd change to metric.

:-)

-- MH '72 97 '77 96 '78 95 '79 96 '87 900T8

Which part of Ireland ? The North or the Irish Republic ?

It's still mph in the North !

GRaham

Tons is a metric unit, 1 Ton = 1000 Kg.

Oops, just found that there are US tons = 907.2 Kg and long tons = 1016 Kg.

I still find that UK motoring journos have a poor feeling for metric units, e.g. when they can write that a new model is 500mm longer or wider and have no visual imagination to spot the error.

but a non-SI unit, for mass, not weight, aka 'tonne' or 'metric ton'.

According to the SI it's 'tonne' and 'kg', not 'Tonne' and 'Kg'

SI says to leave a space between the number and the unit; '500_mm'.

Why is 500 mm (= 50 cm =0,5 m) longer/wider an error?

-- MH '72 97 '77 96 '78 95 '79 96 '87 900T8

I've seen similar examples in Auto Express in the past, but unfortunately I didn't keep the mag. If it's an evolution of a popular model, e.g. VW Golf mark 4 -> 5, then such a changes are obviously excessive.

Duh! You guessed it! She's going to Northern Ireland! I'm an Idiot!

--=20 Regards, Peter Wilkins

Yes, the original ton derived from the Roman occupation of Britain and was originally a wine measure (THAT's how I'd like to buy my wine, in tons!). It was 20 hundredweights which equals 2240 pounds. The Yanks couldn't handle the arithmetic so call a ton 2000 pounds (everyone else calls that the "short ton", but not the yanks) Then we got the metric ton, which by some fortuitous coincidence is pretty close to the original ton. In international trade, people should be very careful to specify which ton they mean - UK, US or metric.

--=20 Regards, Peter Wilkins

Because you have no sense of humor?

Some of us come here to get away from political banter

I thought you said your natinoalistic rant was a result of a bad day and you were done. Keep having bad days, do you?

you certainly don't come here to show you have a sense of humor.

You're right, I go to other groups for that. I come here to help people with saab-related questions. Did you have one, or just more of the same?

This made me curious and I did a bit of digging.

The gallon was not well-recognized, with a number of different definitions in use. The US standardized on the Queen Anne gallon, which was in wide use back to the days of the Magna Carta but formally specified in 1706. The UK abandoned this unit in 1824 when they adopted the Imperial gallon and other measures, first proposed in the

1819 Report on Weights and Measures.

So the ***UK*** abandoned the well recognized standard and redefined the gallon, *NOT* the US.

The "ton" also had/has many conflicting definitions: deadweight ton, harbour ton, tons that are units of mass, tons that are units of capacity, etc. Everyone seems to agree that both US (short) tons and UK (long) tons are "20 hundredweights." Logically enough, the US defines a hundredweight as 100 pounds, hence the 2000 lb US ton. This was in effect at least since 1740. The British hundredweight is defined as 8 stone; however, in 1340 King Edward III changed the definition of a stone from 12.5 lbs to 14 lbs, so the hundredweight changed from 100 to 112 lbs. The reasoning behind this change had to do with a change in the definition of how much a "sack" of wool contained, and was an extremely convoluted reasoning. See e.g.

So the US may have redefined the ton, but there was excellent reason to. The UK definition was absurd and jiggered to cause an inflated sack of cotton to contain an even number of stones -- hardly a logical or sensible basis for measurement.

Gary

As an American not too long out of high school I'd like to report that most students here should be able to handle metric without trouble. If not they weren't paying attention. Everything in science class here is metric - except the spelling :). Funny because a group of us was in an international competition once and the questions they sent to the US were all in imperial measurements and none of us could come up with anything close to an answer in the alloted time because our understanding of all the constants were in metric units. Sure it could be converted but we were all dumbfounded initially.

What's STP or C or the speed of sound or water's heat of fusion/vaporization in imperial? I have no idea.

meter, liter, meter, liter - hope that doesn't bother you :-)

your right. you contribute a lot and i don't contribute at all despite liking my new Saab. But if you want to avoid a slippery slide into off-topic jabs, then it is best not to partake in them yourself. ok. i promise that is my last one and will go back to reading this group in silence and seriously, learn from you about the subject of the newsgroup.

tim